This may be obvious to many nerds, but another huge advantage of running your own site, and choosing your own CMS carefully is how you can optimize for readability and page load performance.

Any platform you choose really only needs to support two things:

1. Using your own domain name
2. Ability to export

I'm not too concerned about hosted platforms - fact is, they make it exponentially easier and faster for many more people to be publishing.

(aside: you're talking about choosing your own CMS and you're using URLs that end in .html?)

The concept of readability is interesting: the major hosted platforms all have non-painful templates, and the best you can customize extensively.

I have been wanting to get a personal brand and actually have design applied to this blog and my link blog: for readability. And properly export / flatten my archived Drupal site.

But on readability: since I will be reading the majority of your content using RSS, I don't REALLY care that much about the design of your site.

So it becomes about the "extras" that you implement on your site.

Starting with RSS, if I've come to your site, you should probably make it easy to subscribe to "you" - your RSS feed, your Twitter, anywhere else you put "good stuff" that I might be interested in.

I think the commenting system is important. That will be one of the reasons I'm visiting your site, that I feel strongly enough to leave a comment.

This blog post is a comment, or a reaction to the original post. I think that would be interesting, to show the web of links that come in and out of your site and individual pages.

Exploring your site, surfacing other good things to read, would be another extra.

(this is ANOTHER blogging-about-blogging entry! is this a trend?)

I'm not sure what other extras I want on your personal blog or site. Thoughts?