Wordpress Vs blogger

Blogging is this activity where you record your boring thoughts in incoherent journals. Other people with blogs then come and share their gyaan in the form of smart-ass comments in a desperate attempt to get you to read their blogs. For some strange reason, blogging is spreading faster than the unnecessary fear of bird flu, and choosing a blogging client can be a baffling business.



There are only two really big fighters in the Arena. On one corner is the powerful, google owned blogger.com and on the otherside is the less well known, but certainly not less impressive wordpress.com, with features blogger.com users dream of.



Posting
Blogger has a simple to use, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor (WYSIWYG) and has a spell check feature, something that wordpress lacks. The create post field also acts as an HTML editor, you can directly write in the code as and when you write your post.



Wordpress, has a basic WYSIWYG editor, along with an HTML editor, where you can actually play around with the code in a separate field from the normal post field. Scores above Blogger because Wordpress lets you upload ANY kind of file as a part of your blog (as well as attach it to a title and description). Note: It is possible to upload any type of file into blogspot as well, but this is a mild hack, as the service is designed for images. At wordpress, the service is designed for any kind of file, and this makes a difference, the effort is not yours in the final outcome.



Publishing: Publishing is faster on wordpress, and has lesser glitches. Blogger is known to stop suddenly, and not show that the post was published, and many times, while using opera, the posts disappear without a trace. Wordpress handles well across all browsers, and posts definitely don’t suddenly disappear.



Categories:
Categorizing your posts under different sections is a feature that Blogger.com lacks, and the most useful one at wordpress. An easy way to keep track of your past posts, wordpress lets you organize your blog better. People make the shift from bloger to wordpress, just to be able to use this feature.



Independent pages:
Another feature that blogger lacks, independent pages integrated with the blog. The blog can be only a part of a personal webpage, with a profile, a resume, a brief autobiography, a photogallery… whatever.



Sidebar:
While blogger has a highly customizable sidebar, which can carry anything as long as you know HTML, wordpress is simpler to use because of the features it allows without the need to know HTML. For example, a blogroll exists on every blog to keep track of the other blogs that the blogger reads, and while you have to code this thing in in bloger, Wordpress does this for you. It also has useful side-bar addons like the current book you are reading, categorized blogrolling etc.



Templates:
Blogger templates are easier to edit, look decent in the three columned ones, and the sheer quantity of choice is unbelievable, there are numerous sites dedicated to blogger templates. Wordpress does not have a template as customizable, but the default one looks better, and there is a decent enough choice available, but almost no competition for blogger here. The quality of the Wordpress templates, are however, superior to those of blogger.



Hacks and Plugins
Blogger has many hacks, where you can cheat blogger to throw up comments in the sidebar, or remove the navigation bar on top et cetera. In fact, you can make blogger throw up pages that don’t look like blogs at all. Where blogger has hacks, Wordpress has plugins, really cool plugins to keep away spammers, plugins for spell checking, filelists,
photo galleries, anything you dream of.



Republishing: After making template changes, it is necessary to republish your blog. Wordpress here is much much faster than Blogger, and the entire blog takes seconds to republish at Wordpress, instead of the minutes in Bloger. Wordpress does not have a preview feature though, where you can see how the new template will look before republishing your blog. Blogger let’s you do this, at wordpress you have to keep republishing your blog, but this is hardly a problem.



Upload time:
Uploading at wordpress is faster than uploading at blogger.



Outage:
Blogger has frustratingly frequent outages, where the servers are maintained, and like load-shedding, there are times when you simply cannot use blogger. This does not happen with wordpress, at least as frequently.



Community: Blogger has a larger, more interactive community, but people learn to interact with blogs of different clients. The only real problem is providing a link back to your own blog wherever its hosted… Wordpress has really interactive forums, where the noob can get his bearings corrected instantly. At blogger, you have to laboriously navigate through the help pages.



Import: Wordpress lets you import all your blogger.com blogs and posts, a feature not available the other way around. If you want to switch to wordpress, you can use this option. Although the importer is pretty quick, if not handled properly, it can leave your blogger blog in a mess, with all the template changes disappearing along with all the text formatting. No problems as long as you do not let the importer window close.



The verdict: the clear winner is wordpress, for all the extra features. Blogger is simply more popular, maybe because its for the novice blogger. If you are starting a new blog, go for wordpress, you will start craving for the features soon. If you have been using blogger.com for a while now, then you would have achieved the look and feel you want, so you may not really feel the need to move onto wordpress – maybe only for the categories. The best blogging client around, is wordpress.