Blogger: Google's Neglected Child

I can't believe what a neglected child of Google, this blogging service Blogger.com has turned out to be. When I wanted to move out of Sulekha's weblogs, I chose Blogger.com primarily because it belonged to Google. I thought that pretty soon, Google would add some great features to Blogger.com and make it the best blogging service out there. More than an year later, I did not expect that there would hardly be any improvements and I would actually regret moving to Blogger.com, instead of shopping around for some other better service.

Following are my reasons to be dissatisfied with Blogger.com in the past and now:

1. There is no facility for categorization of blog posts. I would like to be able to create as many categories as I want, and organize my blog posts by those categories. I would like to see a hyperlinked list of all my categories on the sidebar. This is a very basic facility that almost every other blogging service offers.

2. For some unfathomable reason, the site won't list over 300 of your past posts for editing. If you want see older posts, you have to use workarounds. I just can't believe that the might of Google can't fix this silly problem.

3. Audio blogging requires us to call a phone number and record the message! This is analogous to using a typewriter in the age of computers. Why can't we just upload an audio clip we have recorded by other means? If I want to post a piece of music, I don't want to do it through a bad quality phone line, I want to be able to record it, as best as I can, using a mic and upload the file.

4. Poor or non-working statistics facility. In an ideal world, site statistics should be an integral part of any blog or webhosting service. Everybody wants to know the statistics of their blog or website!

Those are the peeves I have for now. If I come across more things to complain about, I will add them here.

PS: Lukewarm thanks to Blogger.com for improving the picture posting facility. Earlier, we needed to use a separate application called Hello in order to post pictures to our blogs! What were they thinking?