APP EXPLORE REVIEW: Google's BLOGGER

Image from Blogger's official site¹.

Do you like writing despite artificial intelligence (AI)? Maybe you have ideas that you want to share with people but don't want to get in front of a camera.

Blogging may be the answer for you. With an overabundance of platforms to choose from, deciding on what platform can be over encumbering. Whether you decide to self-host or just want to get on a preexisting platform, starting has never been easier.

Even though there are a lot of choices, you may be interested in considering jumping on Google's Blogger as a potential platform to start your blogging journey. For this blog post, I review Google's Blogger to help you determine whether it is the right solution for you.

DISCLOSURE

This review of Blogger is not sponsored by Google and not a direct endorsement of the product and service. The review serves as a resource for helping someone determine if Google's Blogger is right for that person. All thoughts are my own.

BACKGROUND

A VR STORY'S USAGE OF BLOGGER

I've been using Blogger, off and on, since 2019. Those early years, I used it to document events I participated in, where I wrote reviews, and mostly to test web technologies.

Fast forward to September 2025 where I restarted my Blogger account, not only to wet my appetite to write and be creative, but to share my experiences with technology that serves both as entertainment and educational resource. Much of the content is based on topics related to technology, with a strong emphasis on Linux, and can more broadly cover other topics like movie reviews.

Since the restarting the blog, I committed to publishing a post every Monday of every week. I think I missed one or two days and had to postpone several posts to Tuesday, otherwise, I publish Mondays between 8:00-10:00 AM EST. Occasionally, I also post during off days typically if a topic has some sort of time constraint or I feel could help benefit the community if released immediately.

Unless otherwise specified, I do not use AI to write my blogs but use it at a minimum capacity during the research and revision phase (leading up to publishing). Since Google search already uses AI, by default researching topics involves AI, however the summaries the search queries provide are included in the Reference section of each post, similar to this one. When the blog post draft is transferred into Google Docs is when AI is used to revise/proofread. Here is a quick overview of my writing process publishing a blog:

1. Brainstorm Topic(s): There is no shortage of topics to talk about. Publishing weekly is not so easy especially if some topics require a significant amount of time to either research or do, so, many topics will stay in the "hopper" while I maintain the weekly schedule. For instance, many topics technical in nature, typically take more time marinate, when compared to posting about a service outage, since a post about an outage is typically only a summary of that particular event.²
2. Draft: I have different templates depending on the category and topic that the blog post will cover since that will generally dictate the structure of the post. For example, this post is the standard template and the how-to is structured more as a report/instructions document. The drafts are written offline³. Template examples:
   • General Template: "AI Write or Wrong"
   • How-To Template: "HOW-TO: Laptop Battery Cycling"
3. Copy/Transfer: Once a draft is near completion, it is manually copied from my computer into Blogger and Google Docs as a draft post. This is where I make any final revisions.⁴
4. Publish: In many occasions, a blog post is ready before it is ever published on Monday. The only difference is that on Monday, a blog post goes live to the public.

WHY BLOGGER?

As aforementioned, we have an abundance of choices on how and what platform to get started when writing a blog. Other options include, but not limited to, Substack, Ghost⁵, Jekyll/Hugo, and GitHub⁶. Each one has pros and cons. I chose Blogger because it is already included with the Google suite of applications whether you pay for Google or not. This simplifies the onboarding process and reduces the friction of integrating with the other included tools. While Blogger can seem to lack many modern features that come standard with competing platforms, often times the modern features can end up adding unnecessary bloat or even friction for a reader as a consequence. That I will explain in more detail later.

Despite the abundance of choices for blog platforms, Blogger continues to be widely used considering that the barrier of entry is quite low. You may have come across several news and blogs that are built on top of the Blogger platform. Here are several well known sites that use Blogger⁷ provided by Builtwith.com that lists 350,000+ sites using it⁸ (including A VR STORY):

• Hacker News
• Android Developers Blog & Open Source Google Blog
• Cybersecurity News
• Irasutoya

HISTORY OF BLOGGER

Pyra Labs released Blogger in 1999 and was eventually purchased by Google in 2003. Over the course of the proceeding years, Blogger underwent significant changes, making the platform more user friendly and extensible. Built in plugins, called "gadgets", can be added to the blog or can be custom developed. Blogs can be deployed quickly and can be tweaked easily through the user interface⁹.

HOW TO DECIDE

CHECKLIST

This is in now way an exhaustive list of considerations before deciding on starting a blog. Think of it more like a map and you planning the route you are going to take to a destination and not the necessary to the destination itself.

• Ease of Use: More technically inclined people will more than likely choose a more bootstrapped approach. Creative people will probably want to explore being more expressive and having more control over the design. Frankly these are both traps if the intention is just to start writing. Pick one and start!
• Start Writing!: Yeah! Just start writing! Worry about the details of redesign later; do it as you go.
• Building a Readership!: Nobody is going to know what you are about if you don't put anything out there.
• Security: Many blog platforms provide sufficient security. Blogger is no different considering that it is a Google product.
• Artificial Intelligence: Usage of AI is really up to you. If you don't want AI web scraping your blog you may want to consider a platform that creates some friction accessing your blog.
• Goal: There are no hard or soft rule for goal setting. To reduce pressure on yourself, I would keep goal setting, first, as low to as a minimum, as possible so you accumulate small personal wins, and let it snowball over time.
• Price: Not everyone has a "money no object" situation. Price is not always a determinate on whether or not you'll get a return on your investment. While price shouldn't be a determinate on a decision, the better approach would be to starting.

WHO IS BLOGGER FOR?

Blogger is for someone who wants to get start writing a blog immediately but don't want to have "another" account to log into if that person already has a Google account. Blogger is easy to use and integrates well with other Google services. Additional features include the ability to monetize and fully customize the blog experience.

KEY FEATURES

Ease of Use 

Blogger has a very simple interface. Enabling it only requires you to be logged into your Google account.

Integration 

As a Google product, Blogger integrates well with their other products. For instance, you can access photos from your Google Drive or Photos.

Flexiblity 

Like the other blog platforms, Blogger uses web technologies so you can easily migrate to another platform. With that being said, being a web platform, designed around using templates, if you are technically minded, you can at your discretion customize your blog (ie having a custom domain blog.avrstory.net) to your needs.

The only drawback is that Blogger's customization does have its limits. For instance, if you are looking to have a paywall for subscribers, that feature requires a little more effort to set up compared to Substack that includes the subscription model as a standard feature. The trade-off of is availability over direct monetization.

Price 

Whether you decide on using Blogger or another platform, a price of "$" to use, provides a low cost option.

AI 

AI is here to stay. If the desire is not to use AI, the self-hosting may be an option.

Monetizing 

Monetizing uses Google's Adsense that can be enabled when desired.

Accessibility 

Blogger uses minimal resources in order for your blog to be viewable by the public. The templates that render your blog can be customized. The blogs can also be viewed through a browser, like lynx, that doesn't use javascript.

CONCLUSION

This review is a not a direct endorsement of Google's Blogger. I am aiming to help you determine if it is right for you based on my existing runtime of using Blogger. For myself, for now, it is sufficient for my goals with having a blog where I really don't see myself migrating over to another platform. Since the majority of the content I write is intended to be open source making it readily available to the public holds precedence over gate keeping information that otherwise help the general community.

At the same time, just because I am using Blogger, it doesn't prevent me from exploring other products. This is actually a topic in the queue that hasn't been published yet. So, I am actively investigating different options for a variety of reasons.

You should consider Blogger for your blogs, if you are getting started, already have a Google account, want to publish quickly, customize as you go, want your blog publicly available, monetize using Adsense, and want a free platform to write. Blogger, as an application, is a fully featured platform that is easy to use.

If the desire is to write, it doesn't matter what platform your on. It is a matter of whether or not you want to. Cheers!

Have more questions? Contact me directly: avrs_blog@avrstory.net | +1-774-328-7949.

VERSIONS

2026v.0.1.3: list cleanup, key features separate paragraphs, wording: 26Jul27

2026v.0.1.0: init

REFERENCES

1. Official Blogger website ↩

2. I consider my writing process to be quite "loose", sometimes I can lock in and write a post in a half an hour, other times, I revisit a post over a period of time. This process I am not strict about and does not conflict with my adherence to maintaining my Monday publishing schedule. This Blogger review is an example of that. ↩

3. Drafts and near final drafts always start offline. You probably think that I write using Libreoffice Writer but that is not actually the case. I use the terminal and rarely use a document application to write. Instead, I use the helix editor with a spell checker where changing spelling needs to be done manually. Blogger contains limited capabilities for revising so if I feel there needs to be more revisions that need to take place, I can copy the written content to Google Docs. In most instances, I only copy the first 3 paragraphs into Google Docs and revisions are done manually in hopes of always keeping these knowledge and skills "warm" which is part of the reason why I always include a version section of all the blogs. I started including the versioning section of the blog as a way to maintain transparency and document changes that are often edited within Blogger itself (A draw back of Blogger is not having a way to save different versions similar to the feature available on Google Docs or git). ↩ ↩²

4. As I prefaced earlier³, I write using the helix editor; what I didn't explain was that the drafts written offline are written in the markdown (*.md) format and then converted to html. Markdown is a text format that uses standard "text" and symbols that can change the text format into a rendered format. For example **bold** to bold and *italics* to italics rather than using the hot keys Ctrl+ [b | i] or gui buttons. I liken this way of writing is almost a "purer" form that I find thereuputic and fast with low bloat. During the conversion from *.md to *.html not everything gets converted. So I manually have to center pictures and sometimes have to reposition bullet points and other items. These "conversion" edits that I make in Blogger are not included in the versions because I typically determine them to be as an "understood" stage of migrating from offline to Blogger. On the other hand, if I were to include new content or revise some of the wording, that would show up in versions patch.
   There is the potential situation that monetization may be limited to AI, but it should also be considered that a large portion of Google's revenue comes from advertising regardless if they are as a company pursuing AI. If they exhaust their method monetization and their pursuit to implement AI's cost eventually exceeds what they take in, there is also the possibility of Google to potentially reemphasize the way they monetize or at a bare minimum, make it easier for people to arrive at your blog. ↩

5. Competitor blog space: ghost; substack ↩

6. A portion of my development process involves pushing code onto GitHub, where Hugo and Jekyll could have been great options that I considered. These options wouldn't break my workflow because I always start the same way on the local machine and then transfer content over remotely. Posting on Blogger adds some friction but not much. ↩

7. "Top website using Blogger" wappalyzer. Some of the sites listed provided on wappalyzer could be outdated. I checked the html head tag to see if it contained https://blogger.googleusercontent.com(24Jul26) ↩

8. "Website using Blogger" builtwith. Some of the sites listed on builtwith could be outdated. (24Jul26) ↩

9. Wikpedia Blogger ↩