Seriously thinking of moving blog service

Over a year ago I started blogging and done a quick scan of availablle tools and services. I ended up with Blogger as the service seemed quite flexible and I could post to my own URL. What I never liked about Blogger is :

  • They don’t support categories
  • The blogdesign is very basic and you have to ‘html’ a lot yourself

    This evening I have done some serious testing of Typepad and I have to say I am quite impressed with all of the out of the box features. Typepad is a hosted service like Blogger and instead of offering an FTP service to export to your own URL, Typepad offers more advanced Domain mapping. Althoughypepad is a paid service vs Blogger is for free, I do think it’s worth the money.
    What I also like is that there’s an import function (and export guidance) for Blogger, meaning I can move my whole blog over. That does bring me to some questions I have left :

  • Can I also export / Import the comments to my posts ?
  • What are the experiences of other bloggers with moving blogging engine / service ?
  • I use Feedburner for my RSS feed, so I assume I can just point Feedburner to my new feedfile ?
  • WIll Domainmapping sort out OK, so people have no problem finding my Blog ?
  • Is Typepad a good service or am I overlooking other great options ?
  • I still operate 2 blog (one in Dutch and one in English) should I continue this, combine them into one (so Dutch and English posts in one blog) or just skip one ?

    Any hints, tips, tricks are more than welcome 🙂