A Fool of Myself

In the blogosphere, Blogger and WordPress are two very popular blogging tools, but they’re popular for different reasons. Blogger tends to be the beginner’s place to start because it simplifies the art of blogging and makes it easy for the novice to understand. On the other hand, WordPress tends to be the intermediate and advanced bloggers’ tool of choice not necessarily because it’s more complicated than Blogger but because in general, it produces more professional-looking blogs. I’ve used both tools, and I like features in both.

After about six months of serious blogging and reading blogs on a variety of topics, I switched my personal blog from Blogger to WordPress. When I made the announcement, several people asked me why I made the move, but I had a hard time nailing down the reason. I guess I was just ready to try something new—to take my blog to the next level—and I thought WordPress was the place to start.

Even though I had researched WordPress and how it functioned differently than Blogger, a few surprises slapped me around once I made the switch:

1. No custom URL. With Blogger, I was able to direct the original site (sarahjoaustin.blogspot.com) to a custom URL (www.sarahjoaustin.com), which eliminated the ‘blogspot’ in the middle. If I wanted to do the same on WordPress, I would have to pay $10/year and keep my blog hosted at WordPress or host my blog on my own. Instead of forking over the cash, I made due for a few months by forwarding www.sarahjoaustin.com to sarahjoaustin.wordpress.com, but I always hated having ‘wordpress’ in my URL, so I eventually broke down and bought my own hosting.
2. No JavaScript; therefore, no Google Analytics. Too many scripts on a web page can slow down or crash your browser, so WordPress prevents this problem by banning embedded scripts (including JavaScript) on WordPress.com-hosted blogs. On Blogger, I used Google Analytics to track my site statistics, but because I couldn’t embed my itty-bitty piece of JavaScript in my WordPress site, I could no longer use Analytics. But WordPress has its own stats tracker in every blog’s dashboard, so I could still see the most pertinent statistics for my blog. I just started hosting my blog on my own external server, so now I can embed JavaScript again, but even with Google Analytics available, I still use the WordPress stats for day-to-day updates.
3. No HTML or CSS control. Both Blogger and WordPress have some great themes and templates, but I have some HTML and CSS skills, and I like to customize templates to meet my needs. With Blogger, I could completely manipulate the code to make my blog function as I wanted (i.e. change layout, colors, type, images, etc.), but on WordPress, once I committed to a template, I was stuck with the template designer’s choices. Some templates allowed me to change header images, but that was about it.
   

This sounds like a list of reasons why I hate WordPress, but it really isn’t. When I made the initial switch, I was frustrated because I didn’t know I’d have to give up the control that I loved having with Blogger. I wished someone had lined them up side by side and told me how they were the same and how they were different, and that’s what the table below is designed to do. On the left is a list of features that are important to me as a blogger, and in the WordPress and Blogger columns are the details for each tool. If the specs are different for hosting on WordPress and Blogger than they are for hosting on an external FTP server, I’ve listed those, too.