A change in hosting plans…

My attempt to have my blog hosted on MobileMe was short lived as was my strategy to compose my blogging entries in MacJournal and iWeb. MobileMe was simply too restrictive of a hosting platform for what I want to accomplish. The combination of MobileMe and iWeb is certainly adequate for the home user for a simple, personal web site. For a technologist like me who likes to tweak code and customize things.. just didn’t work. I have to say though… iWeb is just top notch for page layout and graphics manipulation.

My current iteration of blog hosting and composing is employing WordPress and MarsEdit. I first learned of MarsEdit from Bill Bradford’s Blog and his entry on Essential Mac Software. This is a great list of Mac Software for Mac users regardless of your interests in blogging. As for WordPress, it’s just one of the top blogging sites around and many of my colleagues are already using it so trying it out was a no-brainer.

While MacJournal does publish straight into WordPress and seems to do a pretty good job of doing it, I wanted to give MarsEdit a go and so far, it’s really been nice to use. It’s designed specifically to publish blogs and thats exactly what it does. No muss, no fuss. It’s customizable too and has given me a lot of flexibility with my attempts at blogging. So far, so good.

As for hosting goes, I moved from MobileMe (which I’m paying for) to WordPress which I’m using as a free blog hosting service. It’s been very easy and straight forward to use thus far. There’re a lot of widgets (such as Meebo Me) and configuration options that are easy to use. All in all, it does what it says it does and does it well. However, if I want to really customize things, I think I’m going to have to move to my own hosting like GoDaddy or Dream Host.