At the end of the day it's the content that counts, not the template.

Should I move this blog and domain to WordPress.com, Wix or Squarespace?

It's something I've always thought about. But it would no longer be free (apart from the relatively cheap £10 a year domain I currently pay for). A steady trickle on the resources in this expensive world.

The advantage of using Blogger is that Google allows you to point your chosen domain at your freely hosted blog, up to 100 of them apparently! With WordPress you have to buy hosting.

Years ago at the start of the internet era I had a few sites hosted on www.1and1.co.uk. www.imagesfrompoland.com, www.polandafter1989.com and www.eusuperstate.com were a few I could name.

They weren't blogs but actual websites that I built using basic HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

I had learnt some basic web design skills and would upload the webpages using File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

Those were the days when I listed www.imagesfrompoland.com on the web directory DMOZ. Google was yet to appear. I actually got some engagement. Certainly more than in the age of social media. Won a 'site of the day' award. Got an enquiry from some museum in America dedicated to the then Pope John Paul II about purchasing some of my photos.

But eventually I let these sites slip away. Nothing much was happening and they were a steady trickle on resources for a freelance English teacher/tutor in pre-EU Poland, later trying to get his foothold back in the UK.

Now I have just settled for Google's Blogger. Easy. Cheap. Free. For now.

Blogger is always knocked for not really being yours and which can be cut off at any moment. But what I've found from experience is that the hosted sites you eventually stop paying for are the ones that ultimately disappear. And your free blog will always be faithfully there, no matter what. Yes, don't believe the marketing hype.

Sure, the templates on WordPress are cooler, especially the paid ones. But then the originality has all gone in this now advanced internet age.

Look at Jaron Lanier's homepage at www.jaronlanier.com. A true technology pioneer and ultimate computer scientist, artist and guru. It's like something from the dawn of the web. Crude and clunky. But original!

Anybody can have a cool looking blog with giant photo backgrounds and new ways of scrolling.

But they all look the same. And at the end of the day it's the content that counts, not the template.

And if I ever do shift away from Blogger and Big Tech, I'm following Jaron down the path of originality. Going back to my roots. And building clunky webpages with html and css again.