After the Blogger collapse last week, Blogger is still not functioning properly. Several widgets on my blog are not working and it takes longer than usual to load. The Dashboard has been working poorly for several weeks now. Other people who blog with Blogger report continued issues with posting and commenting. After the unpleasant experience of Blogger being down for 23 hours last week, I have realized that I don't want to remain without my blog. I love blogging with a passion and want to continue doing it for a very long time to come. I'm only just getting started here, and I've got a lot more things to say. A real lot.
So I've started thinking that maybe Blogger should not be relied on. I read that there is an option to export one's blog to WordPress and leave it there as a back-up option. In this case, if Blogger goes down again, readers will simply go to the WordPress version and continue reading there. Or is it a stupid idea?
Or maybe I should move the blog to WordPress altogether? Are there any distinctive advantages that WordPress has over Blogger? Or is it an even more stupid idea?
Does it make sense to buy one's own domain name? What are the benefits of doing that?
Please help, people, I'm torn and confused. I'm placing a poll in the top right-hand corner and will also be grateful if you elaborate in the comments.
12 comments:
WordPress is a lot better and I speak as an ex Blogger.
Yes you could buy your own domain name but I am not convinced it is necesssary.
It would be great if you could give me some details. What do you like better?
And also, when you moved from Blogger to WP, did you lose traffic? Did regular visitors find it difficult to follow you there?
The switch is not difficult technically. I speak as someone who started using computers in DOS and who can write (X)HTML, and as someone who can do Windows, Linux and Mac, so for an amateur I am less easily fazed than some. However, WordPress does *not* require the actual use of these skills; the switch just requires that you not freak out. If you can get a new computer (same OS) and not freak out, then you can do the switch without pain.
Just put a link from here to the new site and readers will follow you. I did it and the more popular Dr. Crazy did it.
"What do you like better?:
-- W is more reliable, i.e. less buggy.
--The very idea of being open source.
This sounds very reassuring, thank you!
I also have another stupid question. What does it mean that it's "open source"?
I've also used both platforms (my blog is on Blogger, but I've contributed to a group blog on WordPress), and I agree with profacero that WordPress doesn't have the weird hiccups and service outages that Blogger has.
However, I find Blogger easier to use. There's a lot more I can do in it as far as formatting text is concerned.
(There is one awesome thing I was able to do in WordPress that I am unable to do in Blogger --- create "hovertext", or short written passages that appear over an image when you move the cursor there. You might be able to do this in Blogger and I just don't know how --- I am just barely computer-literate, the HTML equivalent of a child learning to read).
Thank you for the input! At first it was great that Blogger was so basic and simply to use but I've been feeling for a while that Blogger has exhausted its possibilities for me. I'd like to be able to do a lot more with the blog and Blogger doesn't seem to develop fast enough.
Google open source but bottom line: real nerds are watching so their sites don't get f***ed up, and you reap the benefit.
"Real nerds are watching so their sites don't get f***ed up, and you reap the benefit"
This is how you know a true pedagogue: she explains things clearly and concisely. :-)
If I do move, I hope you guys still keep reading!
Real pedagogue: this is why I need to go into litigation. I am not joking. With a few well placed concise statements I can stop some ridiculous US drone flights, or other inanities.
I don't know if your intended audience includes people who rely on public libraries for Internet access, but if so, Blogger has at least one marginal advantage over Blogger. I don't know the technical details, but I used to come into the library with a flash drive containing the Windows version of 'wget,' which is basically a command-line utility to fetch and save html pages and associated stylesheets etc. In the case of Wordpress blogs I always got basically unformatted text. I read for content-not-style anyway, so I wasn't bothered by it. I did this most recently about a year ago, so for all I know Wordpress may now be wget compatible, or vice-versa. Also, I have no idea whether anyone else is using wget as a tool for keeping up with blogs. In addition to 'wget,' I'd also bring a file called 'webtodo.html' to which I added searches ('search?q=this+that...', you know the drill) whenever it occurred to me to do so. In an environment where transfer rates are more or less cable-modem but connect time was parceled out in little 20-minute chunks, it seemed to make sense. I'd come home with many hours worth of reading material. It was my window on the world, or at least the world-wide-web.
One thing that did become a pet peeve is 'the fold,' or the infamous 'click here to read the whole story' associated with newspaper websites. While offered on both Wordpress and Blogger, it was implemented earlier on Wordpress still tends to be associated with that platform. You can probably imagine why that would be a little of a buzz-kill when opening up that freshly-downloaded snapshot of the Web...
I confess that I like the blog here better than on Wordpress. However, having a backup in case of outages would be a welcome addition.
How much does your own domain name cost?
Among my friends, Nnedi Okorafor has a personal domain name, but she keeps her blog here on blogspot.com, whereas Mary Anne Mohanraj does not. However, when Mary Anne began her blog in 1995, blogspot was not available.
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