Thoughts on: Simple Blogging
by Phillip
Four years ago, when I barely knew how much better Mozilla Firefox is, I stared at my computer monitor and gawked at the sight of a website that would transform my web career. I didn’t know it then, but that blog publishing system—known universally as Blogger—was bought by Google and quickly ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors.
I began my journey in the blogosphere with Blogger. Like most bloggers, I yearned for some unknown thing that Blogger didn’t provide, so I moved to using Haloscan, and then Cutenews, and finally WordPress. I never touched Textpattern or Expression Engine, but those are different cans of worms. Needless to say, I went through it all, and with each new content management system, I experienced something new.
There came a time after the domains had expired and when I decided create a new blog, I used Blogger (for several reasons, most of which I will cover in the following sentences). I have concluded that Blogger is for simple bloggers, and I am a simple blogger.
Blogger or WordPress?
In my day, the main blog publishing systems were Blogger and WordPress. There are many key differences between accounts at Blogger.com and WordPress.com, and your decision to use the former or the latter to host your blog is based solely upon what features you think a content management system should include.
Let’s begin with themes, because every blogger is obsessed with how their website looks. With Blogger, you are free to edit any of the themes, style sheets and colors, and you can also install a third party theme (a popular website that offers free downloadable Blogger themes is BlogSkins). There’s a catch, however, and that is that Blogger has a unique markup language, so in order to create your own theme, some learning is involved. WordPress seems to fall on the entirely opposite end of the spectrum, where there is no template editing available to users, and style sheet editing is available as a paid upgrade. Select WordPress themes allow you to upload a header image, and even then, many of the available WordPress themes are quite disappointing.
WordPress has consistently allowed the publishing, editing, and deleting of static pages. Blogger, on the other hand, does not offer the same time of availability.
The next issue that arises is how images are stored and how much storage space you get. Unless you have an image heavy blog (like a photo blog or a showcase of your work), bloggers don’t tend to use that much image space. Blogger gives users 1GB of image storage and all images are uploaded to a Picasa Web Album gallery that is linked to your Google Account. WordPress on the other hand, gives users 3GBs (paid upgrades are available) of images, .ppt, .doc, and .pdf file storage and you can add an image gallery to any post. If you’re concerned about uploading other types of files on Blogger, you can always upload .ppt, .doc, and .pdf files to Google Docs.
Another thing that will tear bloggers’ opinions is the static page feature. WordPress has consistently allowed the publishing, editing, and deleting of static pages. Blogger, on the other hand, does not offer the same time of availability. At a first glance, the unavailability of this feature on Blogger seems a little disappointing, however, with some patience and time, static pages can be artificially created.
Those are the main ones, but of course, there are many more feature differences that I didn’t discuss.
Blogger’s Custom Domains
One of the deciding factors that swayed me towards Blogger was the option to purchase a “custom domain.” When you create a blog on Blogger, you will have the option to purchase, for $10 a year, a .com, .net, or .org domain name (purchased through eNom and hosted with Google).
Blogger will both buy and host the custom domain, which is not something you find every day.
Buying a custom domain is a painless process, and it takes approximately three minutes from start to finish.
Simple bloggers?
Blogger’s target audience is the simple blogger, that is, a blogger who enjoys the basic features of a blog without having to deal with more features than they know what to do with. Throughout Blogger’s history, they have done an amazing job of catering to the simple blogger.
While WordPress provides features that an advanced Blogger would find appealing, Blogger’s simple features perfectly quench my thirst. So, are you a simple blogger?
Phillip is the owner of Philflipsnor.
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