I never, ever would've thought of myself as a germaphobic guy. That all seemed to change once the pandemic started. I did my best to stay away from people - direct family excluded - but even that wasn't perfect. There was a bit of a bubble that allowed me to see my niece and nephew while everyone was working and doing school from home.

I know what you might be thinking - well that is if you are actually seeing this, which to be honest most of the world isn’t. But you are. You are reading this right now so you are seeing it.

And you might be thinking, “Wait is he still using Blogger?” And I have to admit sometimes I say that to myself. I am a huge WordPress nerd. I love using it for my podcast website and I use it at work as much as I possibly can.

Even though Wordpress is a free tool, setting it up on a site does have its limitations. First, you may have to pay for hosting. Second, without paying you probably have to deal with ads.

Hosting is fine for a project I hold near and dear to my heart (namely my FansNotExperts.com site that I’ve been running for years - on both WordPress, then over to Blogger, then BACK to Wordpress for the past few years).

And there it is again. Blogger. To me, it may not be the original (I really don’t know) but it is the one I keep going back to over and over again for two reasons. Well, three reasons if you add a third reason - which I just did.

It’s Free

No matter what you can say about the options and limitations of Blogger/Blogspot over the years, cost has never been one thing. It’s never charged me a cent and it has never put ads on my blog unless I want them to be there helping me. It wants to make money off my blog sure, but only if I want to

It's Customizable

You might look at Blogger and say - well there are only so many templates available while WordPress has tons out there for free. And at first glance that might be true, but Blogger actually has a ton of free 3rd-party themes that people create that you can use for, you guessed it - free! I have been off and on looking for a good theme here and there and they always seem to be “magazine” or “photography” based, but when I found this theme I am using right now, it felt perfect and so far it’s been simple and great for me to use for just writing a blog. Check it out here:

https://www.themexpose.com/2017/07/typography-text-based-minimal-blogger.html

Now of course this is my FIRST blog post on this newest, latest, version of a blog for me. But gosh darn it (sorry kids) I don’t want it to be my last. I want this to be the place I go to just to jot some ideas down. Maybe some feelings? Maybe a story here or there? Who knows.

But if I come back in a month and this is the only blog post I’ve created. That’s a shame.

But, hey at least it was free

Easy to Use

Oh wait, the last part. Now I did add some customizing to my theme and there is a learning curve to that (the above link walks you through how to do all that if you want to), but as far as setting up a free blog and just typing? It takes like a minute of your time - you just log in through your Google account and start typing

Start blogging. Do it now. Even if for no one else, do it just to get your brain working. I’ve been sick for the past week (you can guess with what) and starting to finally feel like myself again (cough, cough). I hope that self includes blogging more.

We shall see…