I have tried several blog hosting service such as Blogger and Wordpress. Both are very well known blog hosting service in the Internet. But, why I am using Blogsome?

Blogger is awesome (with the support from Google, everything getting better and better), but Blogger template is a new thing to me. New thing needs extra learning effort and it needs time. Although there are plenty templates offered by many bloggers out there, the one for me is a blog template made by me (a little bit customization from popular template ). That will make my blog special (at least special for me). Beside I still don’t understand the scripting for Blogger, I haven’t found the IF-THEN-ELSE stuff. Every script that I had made is done in client: JavaScript. So, I do not choose Blogger.

Wordpress is great. They provide wonderful templates to choose. The best thing from Wordpress is it’s never bother you to set up the blog, all you have to do is choosing the right template and start posting. But just doing blogging is not fun at all. I need to enhance it with some popular widget. Widget is using JavaScript and Wordpress does not support JavaScript. So, I do not choose Wordpress.

I will not go depth in to each of those two. Because I have done with both. And I am disappointed.

I need blog that almost perfectly like Wordpress blog engine where I can:

• Customize the template.
• Insert JavaScript here and there.
• Upload my picture.
• Inject some server scripting (something like IF-ELSE-THEN stuff).

Then I found Blogsome, a blog hosting service. It offers me features that I am looking for. This is the eight things I like from Blogsome:

1. Free. No annoying ads and no subscribing thing.
2. Choose from variety of Wordpress themes. There are actually 27 themes to choose. Or theme you can start for your own theme to develop.
3. Able to upload photos and pictures up to ~32 M bytes. Blogsome provide mechanisme to upload your picture or photo file with only following extension: jpg, jpeg, gif and png. When uploading file you will be prompt to choose creating thumbnail or not. A very useful tool. But blogsome lack of mechanism to delete the uploaded file. The tool is not listed in admin menu, but you can have a workaround on how to delete uploaded files in Blogsome.
4. Personalize design. There are 4 template files to edit for creating your own design: index.html, post.html, comments.html and stylesheet.css. If have a Wordpress template you like, you actually can use it in Blogsome, after importing it in Smarty of course.
5. Able to insert JavaScript in to template. This is important for widget freaks like me. Putting widget here and there is fine with Blogsome. This feature will extremely useful if you need to monetize your blog. Nowadays, it hardly find a product to monetize your blog without using JavaScript. If you use JavaScript in Blogsome, make sure you have read how to insert JavaScript in Blogsome.
6. Use Smarty template engine from PHP for server scripting. This is feature the most I like. For a PHP experienced person like me, Smarty is not a new thing for me. And for the non PHP experienced, Smarty is easy to learn. Using Smarty as the template scripting will bring you to limitless potential template development. You can choose what text to display to a certain user. This feature is very useful for monetizing blog. Adsense for example, only allow three ads unit in one page, Blogsome able to control this by using Smarty language.
7. Use Wordpress blog system as its blog system. A very well known blog engine. Everybody talks about it. But Blogsome is using the older version, WordPress 1.5.1-alpha.
8. A very responsive forum. You can find every question and answer in one place.

And there is one other feature you may like, it is not official feature from Blogsome. This feature is my blog. You can find Blogsome hack here. Blog save with Blogsome!