I've been getting familar with Blogger software/site.. It's a nice tool - I like it. There's an annoying bug with the session time-out process that's not reading my auto-login cookie, causing me to lose a couple of posts, but that's about the only prob so far. I'm going to get rid of this banner ad pretty soon. It's a reasonable charge for a year's hosting "ad free" ($12) and you kinda get that nice feeling of supporting the Blogging "world domination programme". I took a look at Blogger Pro this morning too. It's got some nice extra features, but I'm not sure it's worth the $35 price tag right now. If Vernacular proves successful, I'll reconsider in a few months.

The thing that annoyed me today was the signup process for killing the banner ad. Blogspot uses PayPal. OMG - what kinda torturous user verification system have they implemented there? Talk about security gone mad! In order to pay the $12 charge you first need a PayPal account. Part of the PayPal signup involves them charging you a dummy $1.95, which appears on your statement with a reference including a 3 digit code. You have to pass this back to PayPal for verifications before you can use your account! Obviously you can't get the reference code until your next statement arrives (4 more weeks for me), unless you have online access. Even then, looks like I have to wait 24 hours until the transaction is processed and it appears on my online statement. Hello? Doesn't this whole thing kinda destroy the adantages of 'instant' online transactions? I dunno - maybe I just hate banner ad's too much!