If not Blogger, what else?

I have preferred to start blogging with Blogger; and it is what I have suggested to anyone else who wanted to blog too.

However, the intermittent problems with Blogger has made me take a re-look at all the options available.

I believe a serious blog should have the following features:

Full HTML editing of the template, just in case you want to fool around.

Comment, and comment moderation. Normally in the spirit of free speech, I believe comments should not be moderated. But this is not always practical. I can't tell a CEO that if someone calls him names, he should not delete it. That's... too conversational!

Image-hosting or easy image-hosting using some service or the other. Blogger does this with Hello. I think Typepad has it built in.

Trackback. I haven't seen PR industry bloggers using Trackback too much, but I think its a sweet feature. You comment on someone's else's post in your own blog, and notify them, and point yur readers towards your source of inspiration too. Blogger does not have built in trackback, the Haloscan service you can use feels clunky when integrated into Blogger.

The capability to make your blog part of your site. Blogger allows you to publish files to your own server. This means a company can easily integrate a CEO blog into its website itself. The company will benefit from the extra traffic, the extra deep links to its site's blog pages and readers will not need to be pointed to which company the blogger belongs to. Typepad, for all its sophistication, does not offer this I think. They do have a URL mapping or something, which essentially lets you type something like www.ceobloggers.com and let it automatically move to http://prplanet.typepad.com/ceobloggers/. Not what I want :(

Movable Type looked brilliant. I am hardly a UNIX guy, and I am sure while the instructions are child's play for those new-age teens, I fumbled badly and could not proceed much. If you got a UNIX guy, or probably even someone who just knows a bit or PERL, I suppose its nothing.

If you can get it to work, it could be the best possible option. You can install it to your own server, and get all the above features on a platter. I suppose Wordpress can do the same; will try my luck with Wordpress next.