Blog software and people's expectations of blogs have come a long way in a year.

In the good old days, blog software only needed to give you a simple form to fill out. Write your pithy comment with maybe an italics or bold, but certainly a link. Click save and the world beat a path to your blog. Well, maybe the success was harder to come by, but the software was that simple.

Six months later and if your blog did not have a feed, you were behind the times. Since there were so many new blogs, feeds made it possible to read more in less time. And they avoided the problem with trying to use the spam clogged email system.

It is obvious now that readers expect to be able to comment on your blog. I think you can thank Howard Dean's blog for that. Everyone expects comments.

So these are the features I'll look at while evaluating and server-side blog tool.