When setting up Dukeville, the thought of building everything from scratch didn't sound very tempting. Having built numerous blogs, I've had my share of tinkering with PHP and CSS and we decided to take the easy way out this time. So it was time to choose a hosted service.

After sizing up various options, there were two finalists: Posterous and Squarespace. Both had their advantages.

Squarespace, on the other hand, is more than just a blogging platform. You can create galleries, forums and whatnot using the slick web interface. Want to modify the template? Just bring up the editor overlay and choose sizes with slides, colours with palettes etc. Everything works smoothly. 

Squarespace won our comparison with two important things that Posterous wasn't able to provide. 

First, I could add Adsense code to the blog (and hopefully some day make Dukeville pay for itself). Not possible with Posterous. With code injection I was also able to add Facebook's Social plugins and be ready for other upcoming goodies from various services.

Also, with Squarespace I am a paying customer. With free services, you get what you pay for - sometimes more, but you're still depending on goodwill of the service owner.