Made My Decision

I think that I've made my decision regarding WP.com.

First of all, from using it, I've discovered that WP beats the pants off of blogger. With blogger, every time that I make a new post, modify an old post, change any setting, or make the smallest modification to the template, it has to republish. This can take a long time, depending on wether or not it needs to republish the whole thing. If you change a setting or modify the template, it needs to republish the whole blog, and that includes the index, all archive pages, and every individual post permalink. That means when I do either of those things, it has to publish over 100 different pages. This is my 104th post, so that's 104 right there. If the publishing engine was any slower, no one would use blogger. Once you have a significant amount of posts, you could literally be waiting several minutes just for the whole thing to be done, and that's on a direct blogspot blog. When you want to FTP it to your own site, it could take even longer.

With WP, it gets published instantly. Period. That's why I was able to get all 104 posts over there so quickly - highlight and drag, click a button, repeat.

So, back to my decision - they stated this on the FAQ:

Can I edit my templates?

We are definitely mindful of making everything more customizable for our users, but at the same time we don't want people to have to look at HTML and CSS code, which is antithetical to the purpose of WordPress.com. If you want complete control over your enviroment, you're probably better off running WordPress on a great web host of your own, but if you really don't want to worry about that sort of thing just stick around and we'll be adding more customizability as time goes on.

So, basically when they add the ability to instert custom HTML somewhere besides in an actual post, I'm there. Even if it's just the footer, I need to put in my counter, Technorati code, and probably AdSense. Otherwise, I'm staying here until they can add that.