Blogger vs Wordpress
16 September 2005
This post is a bit circular and may be worth skipping if you do not have your own blog (web log).
While there are really good blogs about how to blog; I too hate it if I am expecting a particular subject focused blog but instead find a blog that does nothing but talk about the physical act of blogging and disappears up its own bottom. However I am interested in Command Line blogging as not much has been written about that.
Over the last four (or so) years, I have merrily used Blogger for various projects. Blogger is a piece of software that generates webpages, primarily blog-style posts, but in theory you could use it for anything.
The webpages that Blogger outputs can be stored on your own webspace or on Google's server, the latter service being called "BlogSpot". BlogSpot is quite a good deal for non-technical users who just want to blog and then get on with life.
The service is free (as in beer) and the only mini-catch is that BlogSpot automatically displays a menu bar over the first line of your blog. This bar has various buttons for the readers to click on, such as a search button and the popular 'next blog' button which shuffles between blogs, this can bring you new readers who find themselves washed up on your shore.
To cut a long story short, I wanted to move this blog from blogspot to my own server so I could implement more features. However I found that my webhosts' FTP service seems to be broken but HTTP uploads still worked.
If you don't get that last bit then don't worry - all it means is that my use of Blogger has been frustrated so I decided to try something else. Wordpress seems to be the fashionable thing.
Wordpress is a free (as in beer and speech) blog management system. It has far more features than Blogger, even more are available via a plugin system. Of course many of these features seem somewhat peripheral, however the one major plus over Blogger is categories. Wordpress lets you organise any system of categories you want.
Most other Blogging systems have categories, including 'Moveable type', the traditional competition to Blogger. Of course you can implement categories in Blogger, but it is somewhat forced. Basically you post you have to add links in your post to the category yourself and then update the category links, after a short while, this of course gets rather annoying.
Both systems seem to work well enough from text-based browsers such as Elinks and Lynx. Elinks was not a problem in either case, however I gave up trying to post with Lynx under Wordpress. Just one wrong press of a key seemed to fly me away to some place else; when I managed to get back my post was gone.
The Blogger post page on the other hand is far more focused on the task at hand and more idiot proof. The simple answer, of course, is to save drafts often, or write the post out in Emacs first.
One helpful feature of Wordpress was the ability to import all your old posts from Blogger, although it does not import your readers' comments, which may or may not be a good idea, my blogs hosted on Blogspot always have seemed to me a magnet for automated comment spam for the first few hours after posting.
If you want the comments then you could try writing a "best of readers' posts of 2005" article, or repost them manually under the readers' names.
I have not explored all the options of Wordpress yet, so I am still giving it a try. However I may still go back to Blogger if I do not iron out a few remaining issues or if I hit a show-stopper.
1 Zeth says...
The biggest potential showstopper so far has removed thanks to a guy nicknamed 'Podz' at the Wordpress IRC channel. Basically my archive links were not working but going into Apache directory listings.
It turned out that after you have converted the files from Blogger, you should then delete or rename the imported folders because they conflict with the Wordpress archives.
Basically I renamed the folders called "2005" and so on to fish, ducks, etc. Once they were out of the way the archives worked fine.
This makes sense, the Drupal CMS works on a similar system of virtual links, which of course will not work if there are real folders with the same names taking prescendence over them.
Often you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the friendliness of the IRC channel, for example Gentoo people will help while Debian users will shout "RTFM".
My first major problem was solved quickly by the Wordpress freenode channel; do Blogger and Blogspot even have IRC channels?
Posted at 10:49 p.m. on September 15, 2005
2 Phill says...
Hi Zeth,
Just a quick addendum to your post (I know it's been a while since you made it, but nevermind). I found a script that not only imported all your Blogger posts, but all the comments as well! I can't remember the link just now but if you go to the WordPress wiki and the 'Converting from Blogger' pages you should find it OK.
I know you've got all the stuff imported OK now, but I just thought if someone comes across this they should know you can do comments as well!
I managed to write a script that transferred all my stuff across from my (custom-written) blog system in about half an hour, so it's not that hard.
Anyway, better get back to work
Phill (recent WordPress convert :-))
Posted at 2:57 p.m. on October 24, 2005
3 Extra Hot - I Ditch Blogger says...
Being a Google fan, it is hard for me to let go. But like most bloggers who did, my primary motivation for doing so is the lack of categories in Blogger. Blogger publishes to static html files, I think that makes it difficult to implement the said feature. I believe this is also the reason that publishing often takes a long time in Blogger. Wordpress on the other hand publishes your blog posts to a database, hence there's no need to refresh static pages, mostly everything in Wordpress is dynamic.
Posted at 2:42 p.m. on December 6, 2005
4 Steven Cole says...
It's the first time i ran through your site and I found it very informative and interesting. Nicely done!
Posted at 11:06 a.m. on January 26, 2006
5 Bryan Ballard says...
I like your blog. It is a very interesting one.
Posted at 1:05 p.m. on January 26, 2006
6 Zeth says...
"I wanted to move this blog from blogspot to my own server so I could implement more features. However I found that my webhosts' FTP service seems to be broken but HTTP uploads still worked."
This turned out to be a temporary fault, but I am still pleased that I went with WordPress. BTW, I still do rate Blogger highly.
Posted at 11:44 a.m. on February 3, 2006
7 Dustin Chapman says...
Cool site! I'll be coming back.
Posted at 5:52 p.m. on February 10, 2006
8 Augastin Francis says...
Do give http://www.webmasterworld.com/community_building/3174608.htm a look.
Also http://www.hedir.com/cafe/about18221.html which talks about blogger vs wordpress. Blogger is going to die soon.
Thanks
Posted at 7:21 a.m. on December 4, 2006