Save Fitchburg is no more!

Well damn, this is sort of sad.

It seems that Jason at Save Fitchburg, the biggest and oldest local political blog, has called it quits. There will be no more posts at Save Fitchburg.

That's unfortunate, but understandable. While Jason & I certainly haven't always agreed on everything, he's always come across as a decent, intelligent guy who really cared about what he was doing. Unfortunately for him, he also ended up as the guy at the center of a commenting community that could be deeply infuriating.

Sadly, it sounds like the stresses of dealing with the commenters is what did him in, and that sucks. It's totally understandable, though. Most of my commenters here are awesome, but the occasional troll or flaming jackass can quickly sap the fun out of an otherwise good time. Once things become un-fun, there's no reason to continue.

He says he's getting out of blogging and politics and all this nonsense, and doing something else. I'm not quite certain, but reading between the lines of his post, I gather that he's going to start racing Nitro-burning funny cars. And who can blame him?

Pictured: Jason Lefferts and friend

Anyway, it's a little sad to see him go. But such is life.

Good luck with your funny cars, Jason!

Now, somebody please step up to fill his former role of serious local political blog guy. I'm going to stick with making dick jokes.

Hey bloggers, I need some help!

Hello fellow bloggers and assorted other people. I need your help.

See, I'm interested in starting another blog (not related to this one) and I know there are at least a few of you out there who read me and also run your own blogs.

I'm pretty familiar with the Blogger/Blogspot offerings at this point, and am wondering if there's something better out there I should be using. Blogger's okay, but it's pretty basic and uninspiring. Plus the "make a blog before you can comment" policy is desperately stupid, and in general the commenting system is pretty poor.

So do any of you other bloggers have any advice for me? I'm looking for something that allows a good deal of customization, has a good privacy policy (I love my anonymity!), gets listed reasonably well by search engines, and allows more fine-grained control over the commenting system. I'm no slouch with computers, so ease of use is less of a concern for me than power and the ability to make it work the way I want.

I've read various reviews here and there, but they tend to be by people who've just switched to a new system, and are likely to miss a lot of the frustrations and quirks that a longer-term user would know about.

I'm open to pretty much anything, from sticking to Blogger (or Blogger with a different commenting system) to Wordpress, Movable Type, etc., to just buying some server space and installing an open-source CMS on it. If anyone can provide input on the perks (and especially the drawbacks) of their preferred blogging system it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!