To quote the immortal Tripod:
I always get into stuff, just as it finishes being cool.
Well, I decided to buck the trend for once and get myself a blog whilst they were still cool, more for the sake of doing so than anything else I suppose. So, first things first, I had to decide where to have my envisaged blog.
I’m not into the whole “social network” thing (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.), especially after a friend of mine (who for now shalt go nameless) studied the relationships inherent in Facebook for his honours thesis (graph theory), convinced just about everyone else doing honours with him to join it (thus decreasing productivity as they all started to play games on Facebook rather than doing work), and once it was over decided that he was sick of Facebook. I, however, wanted a (semi-)serious blog. I quickly narrowed the list of possible online blog hosts down to Blogger and WordPress.com, as to me they seemed to be the two largest/best free blog hosting sites.
Since you’ve found your way here, my eventual decision regarding which of these two I should go with should be obvious :p. However, I decided as my first blog post to discuss why I decided to choose WordPress.com over Blogger. This isn’t a review per-se, more of a rationale which may help someone else make up their mind.
The Google Factor
Most people seem to think that the fact that Blogger is now owned by Google is A Good Thing (R). I disagree. I think that the following strip from Userfriendly best sums up my feelings on the matter:
I don’t like having all my eggs in the one basket. If Google does decide that they’re going to ignore their famous motto “Don’t be evil”, then at least this blog will (hopefully) not be under their control (then again, it mighn’t be long until Google is the internet :p ). It’s bad enough that – just because I’m signed in to my gmail account – I can’t even access Blogger’s front page easily and instead get redirected to a sign-up page.
Hosting
Down the track, I may wish to port my blog over to my own website. If and when that occurs, then it should be much easier to shift my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted (or at least externally-hosted) WordPress installation, whereas Blogger doesn’t even seem to let people export their blogs. This sounds suspiciously like the techniques used by a certain company… 😉
Reputation
Blogger aims to be hip. WordPress.com seems to be catering itself slightly more towards the intelligentsia of the blogging community. I never claimed to be hip or cool, but I do like to think I have some “little grey cells” in my head 😉 The actual setup and layout of WordPress.com also seems to be more professional, though this opinion dropped slightly when I saw after I first logged in the word “Howdy” used to greet me.
Layout
Most people on Blogger seem to use this extremely annoying theme where all the blog content is in this tiny little rectangle taking up the middle quarter to third of the screen… and that’s it. The box seems to be hardcoded to be that size rather than dynamically growing with the text size. This is particularly annoying to me, as I like to increase the font size of most web pages I visit to make them easier to read.
I know that this isn’t a universal trait: there are some Blogger blogs that take up the majority of the horizontal screen space, just as there are WordPress.com themes that restrict the blogging area. But the impression I received from looking at various blogs that this is not the norm.
Feature Promotion
WordPress.com has rather clear links off its main page showing various features available, as well as the different themes, etc. that bloggers can use. Furthermore, it is possible to search through the forums to find discussions on other possible features, etc.
If this is also the case for Blogger, then they’ve hidden it well. All I got is “hey, now that Beta is no longer Beta, we’ve got cool stuff!” without an actual explanation of what that cool stuff is. I still can’t find anywhere what exactly the features in the Beta where meant to be.
Advertising
I don’t mind having a couple of small, unobtrusive ads on web pages or blogs to help alleviate the costs of providing a free service. So I really don’t have a problem with what I’ve read that WordPress.com is trialling the usage of ads on some blogs. After all, it’s quite rare to get something for nothing!
However, I believe that if you are blogging solely to make money, then you should get yourself a real job. Blogging to me is an opportunity for people to get their ideas out there to other people, and you should be grateful that anyone is actually interested in what you have to say, rather than trying to scab some money off them. So I don’t like Blogger’s approach of giving people a cut in exchange for them letting Google put ads in their blogs. That’s just increasing the overall amount of greed in the world.
Summing up
There’s probably other reasons I chose WordPress.com over Blogger that I can’t recall at the moment, but these are probably the most important ones anyway. The only real concern I had with WordPress.com is that Blogger apparently plays nicer with Haskell code in posts, but using <pre> apparently works well enough.
So, here endeth my first blog/rant. I’m aiming to use this blog mainly for discussions of a more technical nature, but possibly including some more personal-style posts as well (and by that I don’t mean post-teen angst about people not liking me, but more on various ethnic, etc. issues that affect me). So, to all 3 of you reading this, I hope you liked it! :p
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