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Add to SafariWhen comparing Blogger vs Metalsmith, the Slant community recommends Metalsmith for most people. In the question“What are the best blogging platforms?” Metalsmith is ranked 9th while Blogger is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Metalsmith is:
Because metalsmith is at its core focused on transforming directories of files, it can be used for more than just static site generation, and could be used as a build tool, a documentation generator, or any use that requires file transformations.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro No ads
You can turn on ads if you want, but you can also keep your Blogger blog ad-free. That is different from WordPress.com (free hosted WordPress) where there are ads, and you cannot do anything about it.
Pro Free
hosted by google
Pro Javascript friendly
You can include Javascript snippets and widgets (like Pinterest widgets for example) in posts and in sidebar items. This makes it very different from WordPress.com (free hosted WordPress) which does not allow javascript plugins.
Pro Every Google account has one
If you have a Google account from any other of their services, such as Gmail, Youtube or Google+, you automatically have a Blogger account as well.
Pro Supports multiple authors
Multiple people can contribute to a single blog.
Pro Custom domain support
You can use either your own URL or a *.blogspot.com URL.
Pro API
The Blogger API allows you to publish and manage your content via a custom client app
Pro Allows custom advertisements
Such as project wonderful, or just google adsense,. so you can make money from your blog.
Pro Android and iOS mobile apps
Allows viewing and editing content from your mobile device.
Pro Analytics integration
There's very basic analytics, but you can upgrade if needed.
Pro Flexible beyond a static site generator
Because metalsmith is at its core focused on transforming directories of files, it can be used for more than just static site generation, and could be used as a build tool, a documentation generator, or any use that requires file transformations.
Pro Designed around plugins
Everything in metalsmith is a plugin, and it is designed to make it easy to write new ones.
Pro Chaining API
Metalsmith uses a chaining API that's consistent and simple to use:
Metalsmith(__dirname)
.use(markdown)
.use(templates('handlebars'))
.build();Cons
Con Bad post editor
It is a WYSIWYG html editor, and it would be a bit better if it used <p> tags. Instead it uses divs and brs everywhere, which leads to inconsistent or just crappy typography and spacing.
Con Limited authorization system
Sadly the authorization system is fairly limited. Co authors can post and publish, without you getting a chance to pre-check their posts as an admin. e.g. you can't give them "create" and not give them "publish" permissions. They can only edit their own posts however.
Con Can be very slow
Loading times can be huge - results may vary on your use of template, but even a fairly lightweight template can load quite slow.
Con Not fully HTML4 or 5 compliant
And impossible to get it perfectly accepted by the W3C verifier no matter how much you tinker.
Con Small community
The Metalsmith community is still fairly small compared to the more popular options. This results in a lack of learning resources and difficulty finding support from experienced users. However, a slack group has recently been started.
Con Not client enabled API chaining
According to the spec on API chaining, the API request/response need to associate an API object to an corresponding controller/action/uri to be able to validate and handle the request/response and the datasets.
Without that, the consuming client service cannot properly validate or relate the datasets from one to the other. Links have no relational value and the api object creates the relationship between the datasets while maintaining an api/dataset relationship with the corresponding controller/action/uri
As such, the current methodology supported would not be able to be called by the client not supported by the client in a RESTFUL manner
