Heck of a good blog site

Having just gone to Google's Blogger.com to create this blog, I am forced to admit that they really got it right.

Blogspot is one great blogging site:

• It was easy to set up
• The editor is really decent
• Most of the features I really wanted were standard:

o   Comments

o   Email alerts for comments, with the ability to send them to multiple addresses

o   The ability to save and edit multiple drafts

o   The ability to defer publication to a later date

o   Fully customizable templates

o   Syndicate full blogs or summaries only

o   Automatic back links

•  It was easy to enable the other things I really wanted:

o   A categories widget (i.e. Labels), so I can do all my blogging in one place, but make it easy for readers to find things.

o   AdSense Ads

o   Integration with Amazon Associates

• There's stuff I’ve only wished for in my dreams:

o   The ability to send an email to the blog.
(80% of the time, it’s an email that becomes a blog, when I realize it’s worth publishing. Only 20% of the time do I start out knowing that I want to write a blog. In fact, this post started as an email!)
o The ability to have your emails posted directly to the blog, Twitter style, or saved as a draft for later editing, article-idea style.

• And yet more interesting stuff I haven’t even used yet:

o   Up to 10 “stand alone” pages for reference info

o   The ability to add multiple authors

o   The ability to restrict readership to designated parties

(That could get interesting, at some point.)

There are only a few features missing:

• Labeled RSS SubFeeds (i.e. an RSS feed for each category)
  (So someone could subscribe to my DITA posts, for example, or aggregate them, without having to filter out all the things they don't care about.)
• Blogger doesn't use the Google Docs editor, so some of the great formatting features there (like control of line spacing) do not seem to be present.

Oh yeah, and while I'm being nit-picky:

• It would be really nice to know what the URL of a scheduled post will be, when it's published.
  (That makes it possible to insert a link to an upcoming post. For example, "Part 2".)
  
• Hierarchical categories would be nice.
  (The typical separator is a colon. So DITA:Style would be a subcategory of DITA.) 

But since those features are pretty much the only things left to add to this particularly slick undertaking, I'm guessing it is only a matter of time.

Now I just have to figure out how to make the text use the available space, instead of being stuck into a tiny column. But that's all on me!