Blogger: starting to make my balls ache

The idea that blogger is free and takes less time to set up that it would to read this post is pretty cool. But I am running into some limitations that are starting to bug me.

There's no way to notify all members of all postings -and- comments. You can subscribe to the RSS feed ( real easy, right? heh ) and the new topics will be listed, although you have to look for them. But the comments... forget it. You can't subscribe to a post and get notified when someone comments. You can't subscribe to an author, and get notified when that person posts anything.

Search Sucks Much Ass. I tag most post to enable an easy search. For example, all the essays are tagged with the word "item" and the authors name. In theory this should mean that when you type in the word "item" in the little search thingy you'd get back a list of all posts that include that tag. You don't. This is all the more frustrating because Blogger is owned and operated by Google; You'd figure "search" would be something they'd have down.

No post-trimming. Some blogs you see have about a aragraphs or two as a default, then a little "more..." link at the bottom. This fits more posts on a page, and makes reading the blog as a whole much more manageable. Especially when our posts are long ( like the essays ). Can't do this with Blogger, either.

And so on.

I have a TypePad subscription for my professional blog, although I don't know if it bends and stretches as I would like. Also, the url would change. Also, not sure if I could export what we already have by hand.

The blog as we have it here will do... but I recognize that the above issues are a pain. I'm working on fixing/hacking the ones I can, and I'm always open to adivce or suggestions of other blogging solutions.

Ack.