Blogger

Blogger vs WordPress

Hi,

If you’re reading this, you’re reading it on my revamped site. The old site was http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com – hosted by Google’s Blogger application. I’ve now moved to a hosted service on Bluehost with WordPress, and my own domain http://adamfowlerit.com.

Part of the reason for doing this was that on Blogger, I couldn’t do something I consider basic – add a twitter feed panel on the side. They used to have an addon that did this, but it has been broken for a long time. To it’s credit, Blogger is incredibly easy to set up – if you’re looking at just starting out and getting some content up, it’s a great platform for the basics and served me well. Once you want to start playing around a bit more, you’ll find Blogger limiting.

With my jump to WordPress, I was rather spoilt from the ease of use on the Blogger side. Not to say that WordPress is difficult, but it does take a lot more time and effort in comparison. There’s a lot more support for WordPress out there, with so many sites using it now. You can customise so much, and there’s different levels of customisation. A lot of the basics are quite easy to do with the web based GUI (in which I’m typing this post now), but if you want you can break out the CSS code and change anything.

There’s a huge amount of themes you can choose from as a starting platform, as well as plugins to add extra functionality (such as a twitter feed!). Someone’s even written an importer so it’ll grab all the content from your Blogger page (including comments) and put it into WordPress.

I’m still learning with it, so please feed back any suggestions.

So, for a lot of people, Blogger will do the basic job, and do it really easily. For advanced stuff, WordPress is the go. It’s ‘free’, but you’ll need to host it somewhere. I’m paying a few dollars a month for it to be hosted at Bluehost with a bunch of other features included.

Details available here:
BlueHost or if you want to give me a referral,copy and paste this: http://www.bluehost.com/track/adamfowl