Blogger vs. WordPress

[Daniel Leuck]

I'm planning to start a blog as an outlet for my non-technical ramblings. Any thoughts on the best platform? I'm looking at Blogger and WordPress.

[Ryan]

I presume you mean hosted, then? At Blogspot.com or WordPress.com? Believe it or not, my only externally hosted blogs are on Blogspot.com, and I've never tried WordPress.com. I'm all about "rolling your own" and run WordPress independently. Close to fifty installs across several servers and clients, actually.

I'm a WordPress evangelist and would recommend its hosted solution just on principle, but I can't really speak as to its functionality when someone else is running it.

[Daniel Leuck]

I presume you mean hosted, then?

Yes - hosted. I was considering running WordPress on a company server so I could hack it, but I couldn't come up with any new features to justify the effort. Everything I need seems to be covered by the core platforms and their plugins. Why are you hosting your own installations? Is it because of quotas on the hosted solutions? Are you adding new features?

These days I am a big fan of hosted solutions. We used to host everything for customers but these days we typically use hosted solutions for almost everything. You just can't beat the cost and convenience. We use Google for email and calendaring, Atlassian for wiki hosting (Confluence), and Rackspace or GoDaddy for web applications depending on the application requirements. These services get better and cheaper every year.

[Bill Sodeman]

WordPress.com seems to work fine for people, and their service is aggressive when removing splogs - spam blogs.

I use DreamHost.com to host my blog at billso.com, and their Wordpress hosting is fine. This gives me a much higher level of control than I would get at WordPress.com or blogspot, but I have to keep up with the new WP releases myself.

Wordpress.com manages the new software for users.

[Blaine Fergerstrom]

I prefer Wordpress, but host all my own, as that is one of the things I pay Road Runner beaucoup bux for the privilege of doing. I run my own server, so have ready available resources.

There are plenty of plug-ins and skins available for free, as well. Akismet comment spam filter is realy terrific! Otherwise found no need to hack it myself so far.

Blaine

[Bill Sodeman]

I prefer Defensio instead of Akismet. Defensio seems to do a better job of catching the comment spam.

[judi clark]

Having used Blogger for several years and many different kinds of blogs, I can say that they're a royal pain to export from. I just got help (thanks Eric!) importing them all into WordPress.

I'm using WordPress for future blog posts because of standards compliance. WordPress is straightforward to change formatting, add widgets, or move to a new host if needed.

If you haven't made your decision by October (somehow I find that unlikely), you're welcome to check out WordPress at PodCampHawaii.

[Damian Davila Rojas]

I have used both of them and I definitely prefer WordPress over Blogger because WordPress has greater widgets selection.

However, my main complain about WordPress is that it does not allow any code that includes Java, so you cannot embed fun Java script widgets such as Shelfari. WordPress automatically suppresses them. A solution is to host your blog outside of WordPress and just use the WordPress script to create your blog. (I wish I had known that before signing up for hosting!)

A current issue about using WordPress is that you cannot implement Google Analytics into it (when hosting your blog at WordPress) because 1) the updated, non-Urchin code is Java based and 2) the Google Analytics code is already implemented into every blog via the WordPress Blog Stats. WordPress claims that the Blog Stats are good enough. I strongly disagree. There is a strong push to create a Google Analytics widget.

Despite these two issues, I strongly recommend using WordPress over Blogger because it makes blogging a snap!

Check out my WordPress blog at www.idaconcpts.com, here we we put ideas and concepts to work in web analytics.

Cheers!

PS: Where is the Web Analytics group?