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| Morning mist over the River Usk obscuring the Blorenge Mountain |
Is Wordpress better than blogger?
When I decided to start a blog, the question was: should I use Wordpress or Google’s 'blogger'? Both had their devotees, with a slight bias towards Wordpress. I finally decided to plump for blogger for the simple reason that I already had a googlemail account so I felt I’d be ‘keeping it in the family’, so to speak.
But since I joined Twitter last year, I’ve been reading a great many blog posts about blogging and there often seems to be an assumption that any serious blogger (in the sense of a person who blogs!) will naturally be using Wordpress - and I’m wondering why. It almost seems as if there are first- and second-class bloggers but perhaps I’m attributing a kind of technological snobbery to this, that exists only in my slightly befogged mind.
It’s true that blogger does have its occasional ‘mad moment’ and recently I’ve been getting ‘error 503’ rather frequently. But refreshing the page seems to solve that error quickly and effortlessly and on the whole I rather like using blogger. It mostly seems to do ‘what it says on the tin’!
Content aside, I have quite strong negative feelings about Wordpress. When I visit a Wordpress blog, my first visual impression is generally less ‘user-friendly’ than a blogger blog. It often takes just that important fraction of a second longer to locate the actual blog post on the page. With time and attention at a premium, that matters.
And then there’s the business of commenting. Many a time, I’ve decided not to bother with commenting because there seem to be more boxes to fill in – email address, website URL etc – than with blogger. And if I want to be informed of follow-up comments, emails arrive which require me to ‘subscribe’, not just once, but for every set of comments.
But probably the feature of blogger that I most appreciate is the ‘follow’ button. Just a couple of clicks and a small adjustment to my bloglist in the sidebar and I can easily see when the blogs I follow are updated. No need to bother with RSS feeds, Google Reader and the like, which I have to contend with if I want to know when a Wordpress blog is updated!
There is a huge amount that I don’t understand about computers and the internet – is there a person alive who knows it all? So it’s likely that I am missing something about Wordpress, due to my lack of knowledge and understanding. But when I start to read about the wonderful ‘plug-ins’ and ‘apps’ that are available with Wordpress, my mind seems to turn into something resembling the mists that often obscure the Blorenge Mountain that I can see from my upstairs windows. I believe the correct term for this is ‘cognitive shock’ and it’s not a condition I enjoy!
So, please, if there are any Wordpress advocates out there, is it possible to explain the advantages to someone who is not entirely technologically challenged but who likes to keep things computer-related as simple as possible - to free up as much ‘brainspace’ as possible for the important things in life?
