My criteria for a blogging tool is pretty straight forward:

1) I don’t want to host it on my own server

2) I need to have some control over the template, html, css

3) I don’t mind paying some sort of fee for flexibility

Posterous - I heard lots of good things about posterous.com and decided to give it a try. To my disappointment, there were only 5 templates to choose from.

Weebly - I <3 weebly. Lots of templates to choose from. They offer easy to use drag and drop editing/layout tools and seriously, you don’t need to know any html/css to get all the freedom you need to play around with the design and layout! The only problem I had was I didn’t feel any love for the templates offered.

Wordpress - A strong blogging community and lots of templates. However, I thought the widgets were a little limiting. I do like the “category” feature and integration with typekit.com though. For those who are tired of Arial, Tahoma, Lucidia etc (like me), typekit offers a whole new library of fonts and it works on any browsers that support @font-face. Well, to use my own domain name and also have the freedom to edit css/html, I had to pay 2 fees annually. Hmm…I didn’t mind paying for full control of css/html but a fee to map my domain over to wordpress?!? That’s when I thought I should explore Tumblr.

Tumblr -  What I love about Tumblr is the freedom to hack! Definitely not for beginners. I have full control of the html/css, add additional api and 3rd party tools like commenting capabilities (if needed). Easy integration of google analytics. The only issue I had was the lack of “category” support. Only tags are used to categorize a blog post. Regardless, I was able to change the design and use my own domain name without paying a dime. Best of all, I don’t have to worry about hosting.