Blogger doesn't get much attention and I'm somewhat surprised Google hasn't killed it. (Maybe enough people run Adsense to make it worthwhile.) But it's perfectly adequate for a basic blog and, if you do get a traffic spike, it handles it without breaking a sweat.
Are there any significant blogs still active on blogger? I just checked my RSS feed and apart from one obscure naval history blog, they're all wordpress+custom domains.
>Are there any significant blogs still active on blogger?
Why does that matter?
It's an easy and free way to host a blog if you want to start a blog. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles you can get with Wordpress but if you just want to start a basic blog, it's perfectly suitable.
I still have a Blogger site just because I am not sure how to export all the data without days of work to copy the content, images and reformat everything to go to something like WordPress or markdown [0].
I think what I'm about to do is put a new website on Wordpress (vs. statically-hosted on AWS) and start a new blog on there--and just point my Blogger site to there. No particular reason to shut down my Blogger blog unless Google ends up killing it.
I'd advise going with Wordpress instead, in case Google decides to axe Blogger. If wordpress.com gets axed, you'll be able to migrate your blog to another Wordpress hosting provider with no disruption.
Worth noting that dev.to (and hashnode.com that someone else mentioned) has such a bad reputation for low-effort low-quality posts that's shadowbanned on HN. And nothing of value was lost meme is very applicable.
I've used both, and they make it really complex to move away. After finally biting the bullet and migrating[1] from Wordpress to Jekyll, there was a lot of work involved in getting the Wordpress exported files even barely presentable.
The problem with using Blogger or Ghost is that when the day comes upon which you realize a need for more flexibility in formatting, you’ll have a monster platform transition project on your hands. Just start with Wordpress, use DigitalOcean droplet to start for relatively cheap. Or Wordpress.org if you don’t want to mess with the backend at all.
A reasonable point, but I think to start with one should use the service with the lowest friction so that it is not a hassle to actually post things. Once you get some inertia to post regularly you can worry about 'extras'.
* https://www.blogger.com/about/
* https://wordpress.com