Blogger vs MSN Spaces

For now, i'm going to be brave and try and maintain two blogs - this one, and one on my MSN Spaces beta site. I figure it's a valid excuse for playing with Spaces :-) I'll be keeping my personal stuff / experiences / life record here on Blogger, as always - and i'll move links to cool stuff, arb technical ramblings, and other "not for the record" stuff to Spaces. We'll see how it goes.

One day i'll have enough spare time to create my own Typepad site *sigh*

Remember that Spaces is still in Beta, and Blogger isn't. Both currently suffer from performance issues (Blogger is having db issues which make things slow at times, and Spaces is usually very slow and occasionally times out / disappears on me), and neither is quite as good as Typepad. But it's great to have more competition, as always :-) Both seem to work happily in Firefox, which is great.

So far, comparing the two, we have in Blogger's favour:

• Tools like w.bloggar already exist (and use the blogger api, dunno if Spaces has an api yet).
• Far less in-your-face branding
• Domain mapping (ftp)
• Can customise your template to your heart's content, using HTML and CSS, insert script, whatever you like.
• Stats - you can add a site meter to your HTML template easily, or grab your logs if you post to your own site / domain. Spaces stats suck.
• Support for multiple blogs per user
• No space limit (i think Spaces limits the entire size of your blog to 10 megs, which is horrible if true).

And in Spaces favour:

• Categories! Come on Blogger :-)
• Modules are nice (but you can't add any), and changing the layout is a piece of cake.
• 10 mb storage for photos, and a nice photo album module (not to mention a nice OCX - can't believe i wrote that - for easily converting and uploading images). Far easier than Blogger's Hello "add on".
• Trackback support