I have been hosting my own blog for a number of years using WordPress.   It is fairly easy to host your own WordPress site if you now how to setup a MySQL database and Apache Web Server.  The problem is you have to worry about updates and backups.  I can never remeber how to update WordPress, how to back-up the MySQL database, etc. because I do it so infrequently. And most of all hosting my own blog is not really embracing cloud computing and SAAS.   So I decided to move to a hosted bloggin platform.

First I looked at a hosted WordPress blog, but custom domains are considered an advance feature you have to pay for (but it doesn't even say how much).  I am way to cheap to pay for a hosted blog.  And TypePad even charges for the basic blog features.

Then I looked into Tumblr.  I really liked Tumblr and it had a lot of great themes for your blog.  But it didn't have comments by default.  I soon discovered you have to sign-up for a separate Disqus.com account and enable Disqus on your Tumblr site.  That means comments do not feel integrated into Tumblr and posting a comment is confusing, with disqus.com branding on the comment seciont..  The user is asked to sign-up for disqus and it is especially anoying because if they don't after submitting the comment a pop-up comes up asking them to sign up.  I see commenting as essential for even a basic blogging platform so that was a major fail.

Lastly I tried Posterous.  The themes are fairly minimal and the features are not as robust Tumblr, but all I really wanted was to post my ideas on technology and get comments from my readers.  Commenting on posterous is dead simple and fully integrated, what a novel idea!  It also allowed me to import my old WordPress blog into posterous.  You do have to enable XML-RPC in WordPress which is in the writing settings of the admin panel.

So I am sticking with Posterous and so far really liking it!