You may have noticed...I moved to Blogger.

Hey all,

As you may have noticed, I moved from e107 to Blogger for LABrat.com.  I did this for a few reasons. 

1. I vowed to update LABrat.com with more blogging content.  I need to write more.  I enjoy writing and enjoy information security, so the end result is that I needed to get on my web site more and make it more useful, hopefully.
2. There are no blogging add-ons for web browsers for e107.  Because they are a 2nd/3rd tier product, add-ons to make blogging easy aren't easy to find, if there are any. I spent some time looking but kept running into Blogger and WordPress add-ons.  This makes accomplishing goal #1 of writing more on the blog significantly more challenging.  Blogger provides simple things like a javascript bookmark to use, an IE 8 "Accelerator" and a Word add-in to make it easy to write a blog post about a link.  Third parties have also provided nice hooks and add-ons to allow blogging easily, such as ScribeFire.
3. e107 is a 2nd or 3rd tier CMS/blogging platform.  Yes it has many more capabilities than a standard blog, that's true.  Its not great at any of them, its just good at most of them.  I used the forums for a while.  I used the custom pages/menus/etc for a while.  In the end, I found that I really just wanted a blog and didn't have a need to provide a forum.  Again, more of a CMS platform than a blogging platform, like I was trying to make it into.
4. e107 has only had security and base maintenance updates in quite a while.  New development seems to be stalled.  If you're into php and MySQL this could be the system for you, but its not for someone who's ready to move into blogging only. 
5. I no longer have to pay for running a Linux host with a MySQL database.  This is a minor issue since it was something like $50/yr, but certainly it can be listed as an advantage to save money.  We'll see if I actually get rid of my hosting provider or if I keep it around in order to have a real web server that I can use to host files in a pinch.
6. Blogger seemed to be more streamlined and less complicated than WordPress.  I had considered WP on my hosting provider but I ran into another stumbling block with using WordPress.  1&1's hosted MySQL was too old to install the most recent (and therefore most secure) version of WP.  I can't install an old version of software, knowing there are security issues with it.  It goes against my nature. (I found out later that my podcast and almost lifelong buddy, Nem, would have hosted a WordPress site for me on his hosting provider.  Who knows maybe Blogger won't work out.  I have a backup plan. :-) )
7. My sister (http://superpositron.blogspot.com/), soon to be featured in a New York Times Magazine article(!), and my good friend (http://moener.blogspot.com/) are both using Blogger.  Not a huge factor, but helped me think about it.
8. Blogger is run and managed by Google, which I'm already using on a daily basis for my Google Apps hosted email for my family.  This also means that there's a built-in community of users that already have gmail or google accounts that can comment on content without creating yet another login for another web site.  Something I know I enjoy very much (not as bad now that I'm using LastPass.com for many sites).

So, that's it.  Thanks for reading.  Explore, contribute, have fun.

Chris