About two months ago I began investigating using WordPress as a blog platform over blogger. I had installed it on my local machine and experimented with it occasionally in my free time, of which I have little. Two weeks ago I began the process of moving my blog over to WordPress and one week ago I went live. Peter of Rediscovering the Church helped my quite a bit as I began this journey. I have reached a few conclusions.
Blogger is a simpler platform for basic blogging needs. It is easy to setup and takes little knowledge to make a nice, clean blog. Of course it also takes little knowledge to make a cluttered, useless blog. Blogger has a lot of useful features for being found and followed right out of the gate, but then you begin to reach the limits of the platform. There are many ways to add functionality to blogger but I’ve found that these tend to be clunky and limited. My best example is Intense Debate. It is possible to install this into blogger but it is missing many features. You cannot import your old comments into the ID system and it does not sync your comments so if you choose to leave the system then any ID comments will not roll back into blogger. More over it seems to be slower and more glitch prone in the blogger environment.
WordPress is a different beast all together. It is not quite as user friendly. Well, that isn’t entirely true. It is certainly easy to use in its most basic form, but the generic options are limited and need upgrading to be useful. For example, the basic settings show your webpages at .php?query pages, which are the way the server sees the page. This is not very useful for human interaction or web search algorithms. These settings can be changed but this involves some exploration of the WordPress consol and possibly making some changes to the file permissions on your hosting server. In my case I had to make some changes before I could show my pages in a more search engine and user friendly way.
Of course this is offset by the number of plugins available. The difficulty is picking the right plugins since most functions can be done by many different scripts. That is where Peter also helped me. Being a geek I am not satisfied to leave well enough alone and so I’ve already begun modifying my plugins so they are more unique to my site. Peter uses the “cute profiles” plugin, which displays my various social interaction platforms on the left in nice little icons. I made some small changes that allow mine to change size and go full color on hover not just go full color. It is more like that quick silver dock in the Mac OS that way.
WordPress also gives me more direct control over the layout of my site. In blogger you can directly edit the CSS and make some major changes to the template but the level of customization is limited to positions. With WordPress I can change the function of my website. I can make it a blog, a Content Management Service, or even an online shop.
I have a lot of learning to do and I’m working on building my own templates, but I’m really enjoying the journey. I’m looking forward to helping a friend with her transition into WordPress soon.
What are your experiences with blogger, WordPress, or other blogging platforms? What is your favorite WordPress plugin?
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I like WordPress for a couple reasons: 1) Analytics. From what I've seen, it has the best set up. 2) The dashboard works like WordPress.org, making it an easy transition for me.
I actually used WordPress.org first, then when that site was hacked started a new blog on the .com version. So yeah, that's how I got involved with WordPress. Also, I like the way comment are set up on WordPress more than other platforms (but it doesn't really matter on my .com blog since I've closed all comments there anyway).
-Marshall Jones Jr.
P.S. The blog in my link here is to my .org blog, which does have comments.
I'm planning on upgrading to the newest analytics plugin release today or tomorrow. It look much better than the one I am currently using. I've found that often I install a plug-in but don't get the latest release for some reason. I have started trying to research the versions to make sure I'm up to date because the server I'm on is prohibiting automatic upgrades because of some settings I haven't be able to change.
I tried wordpress.com and was very disappointed in the functionality of that site. It is very limited and quite frankly blogger gives much more ability to expand.
Great summary, Nick. (and thanks for the shout-outs, anything I can do to help, just let me know).
My experience is pretty much the same as yours, although I didn't really try blogger for any length of time as its restrictions were too great for me (I had just been developing a site in Joomla and going from that to blogger was a huge backward step in flexibility).
I'm looking forward to seeing all you do with WP. Your skills are greater than mine and so I'm hoping to be able to copy some ideas from you 😉
My recent post Three Reasons Why Online Connections are Great
How do you like joomla? I work with a charity and am planning on settin gup a site for them. I'm torn between Joomla and Mambo, plus I recently was shown concrete5. I'm also wondering how well WordPress would work for them.
I actually started blogging on WordPress because I preferred it for a number of reasons. The main one was the user friendly dashboard, and the fact that I could seperate my posts by pages, categories and tags. This was good for my literary blog.
I set up the Sharkbait blog on blogger just to test it, and see if it was better. (I never expected anyone to actually find it, and read it)
I still prefer wordpress, but since most of my blogging buddies are on blogspot, I stay there.
Most of my blogging buddies are on blogger and I do have a couple of blogs there for now. I'll end up moving them eventually too. I am still on blogger quite a bit. One plugin I'd like to find/see made is one that allows for blogger account login for comments. Of course this would have to be through Intense Debate. It would be nice for people with blogger accounts to be able to comment through that system.
I like the simplicity of blogger.
You understand computerese, and I believe you when you say that YOU can do more with WordPress.
I don't believe that I would be able to do more with WordPress.
I am glad you are happy with your move.
Best wishes…
Once the basic plugins are setup for you WordPress is actually easier to use in many ways, including picture placement. Wherever your cursor is when you click "add image" is where the picture goes. Much better than blogger which is really annoying if you want to add images throughout a post.
Hey Matt. Love reading your blog, This is probably my first comment and I am really sorry that it is a gripe.
It is appropriate to this post though. I think when you converted (the timing is about right) your feed burner started putting out only the first few lines of the post. I mainly read in a reader and some of the time I am left thinking “Man that was a short post, he said almost nothing.” forgetting that the feed was truncated.
Any chance of addressing this? or was it a strategic choice?
Oh and I love WordPress, despite only being on wordpress.com.
Um, it's Nick … like Nick the Geek. Anyways I'm not bothered about the gripe.
I noticed after my first post went to feedburner. I checked to make sure everything was working right and I realized that it only showed the summary. At first I was going to try and find whatever setting enabled that but then I thought, "how many people actually read this? The summary will save them time and they can get on with their day." It's weird but for someone with a huge ego I tend to assume others aren't even remotely impressed with me.
I think I can change is pretty quickly, though I might start making a slightly longer summary with a tag at the end about clicking through for the actual post. I still assume that most people are happier with the cliff notes version of me.
What do you think, would a longer summary with a click through note be better or just go for the full blown post in RSS?
Um, it's Nick … like Nick the Geek. Anyways I'm not bothered about the gripe.
I noticed after my first post went to feedburner. I checked to make sure everything was working right and I realized that it only showed the summary. At first I was going to try and find whatever setting enabled that but then I thought, "how many people actually read this? The summary will save them time and they can get on with their day." It's weird but for someone with a huge ego I tend to assume others aren't even remotely impressed with me.
I think I can change is pretty quickly, though I might start making a slightly longer summary with a tag at the end about clicking through for the actual post. I still assume that most people are happier with the cliff notes version of me.
What do you think, would a longer summary with a click through note be better or just go for the full blown post in RSS?
Stupid me! I know it's Nick. I think I must have just been reading "Church of no People" Matt while I waited for the post to load.
Personally (and don't let this go to your head) I like the way you write. The summary tells me "What" you think, but the full post is an indication of "Why". Often the "Why" is more important than the "What".
So if I get a vote I vote for whole posts in the RSS 🙂
To give you the "Why" I like to read your stuff… I see a lot of myself in you. I am also about your age, married, I have two young girls (8mo and 3yo), am a geek, Christian and was a youth pastor for a number of years. I understand a lot of you frustrations and can celebrate your victories. And somehow this gives me a fuller picture of who I am.
So thanks for being you (Nick not Matt 🙂 ) and for communicating so transparently.
I'm a day late on posting… but I *heart* wordpress. I moved from blogspot to wordpress only a week after starting my blog nearly a year ago. I needed "freedom" and wordpress provides it, and I love that they work on improvments all the time. WELCOME 🙂
Nothing wrong with being a bit late. I love your blog, it looks great and you have certainly taken advantage of the freedom WP offers. I'm also glad for the regular updates and the plugin update notification.
Unfortunately I had to fix a bit of code that didn't work for my site so I could use automatic updates. I think their code generally works but I hope they think to provide an option to manually enter the tmp folder for sites that aren't configured for scripts to access the system tmp folder correctly. It took me a good hour before I figured out how to make it work. Manual update would have been faster but I'm a bit obsessive.