My Journey into Word Press

I was confused as to how my blog should look like and how do I have the various topics covered on the Blog. In last few days I had experimented with Google Pages and Blogger working in tandem. I had 5 different blogs on the web for different purposes and they were linked to a Home Page on the Google Pages.

Different Styles on Google Pages and Blogger made everything look very odd. I was clueless how to go about it. Google Pages won’t let you import any new styles (CSS) and have limited number of uninspiring styles. It would be better to have similar looking styles on the Google Pages and Blogger and a way to integrate the both. I don’t understand the Google’s way of having every thing in duplicates. They have the Google Video and the YouTube and now the Google Pages and the Blogger.

While all this confusion persisted I was told by someone – (that some one is arun_k_d) about trying WordPress. As I was eager to have some kind of uniformity of shorts I didn’t think twice before logging in to WordPress.com.

That is how my Journey to the WordPress begins and here's a look at what it was like.

Dashboard:

• The interface of WordPress was easy for a novice and I was at ease with it instantly. Initially though I fiddled with the WordPress Dashboard and saw the recent happenings about my blog aptly called “Your Stuff”. In the Blogger Dashboard’s got a lot of useless clutter.
• I was impressed with the Blog Stats and the Feed Stats, in Blogger I had to go to Google Analytics to know how miserable my blogs are performing. Tag Surfer is a cool way to know what others are talking about. This is there nothing similar to Tag Bowser in Blogger that I have come across.
  

Posts and Comments

• In the Write Tab I saw some common tools in the right-hand side of the page, and better still you can configure it as well. What I liked was WordPress has to option to selectively allows Discussion and Pings for each post. You also can have private messages- I am not sure what can be done with private posts. Track Back, Post Password, Post Slug is yet to be checked by me. I liked the Blogger Interface for posting to blog it is neater and less options to worry about.
• For Managing or Moderating comments in WordPress you can edit them. I am yet to use it on Blogger. On WordPress You know from where the person is posting (his IP address is given). Comments can be classified as Spam – it is an easy way to delete all the Spam messages from a person.

Managing Posts

• Manage Tab is what made me to switch to the WordPress. The management of Posts is not very different from the Blogger, only it is based on Ajax or Flash or something like that which makes the posts disappear as soon as you click delete (I know absolutely nothing about any programming so don't know how it is done). In the Blogger it takes more time and confirmations to delete a post.
• Word Press lets you have separate web pages and you can have one of the Static pages as the Front Page from the Options Menu. This solved my problem of having to use 2 different domains on the Google Pages and Blogger and also got the uniformity of the look and feel of the entire web site.
• The Categories in WordPress are known as Labels in Blogger. Label sound good to hear. But there is no Label management in the Blogger. WordPress is a lot better. You can edit the Categories, if you feel like changing the names in one go. Blogger allows to delete or add labels with out going into the post, from Label action drop down menu in Edit Post Tab. I had not seen it earlier. But does not let you edit the Label though.
• The best thing that I saw was the Import facility form LiveJournal, Blogger among others. So I instantly pressed the button to import from the Blogger and import all the 5 blogs I have there. Changed the labels and – I am done. I plan to update this piece on the Blogger first and import to Word Press.

One mystery surrounds me till now. WordPress automatically logged in to the Blogger and imported the posts from all my blogs. But I could not understand how WordPress knew about my Blogger ID and Password? I had given only my Yahoo Email id at the time of registration. Only guess I could have is since I was logged into the Blogger at that time on my computer so WordPress could have picked up from the cookies.

• By the way WordPress lets you export as well if you may like to combine 2 or more blogs into one. Blogger doesn’t have this so I had to delete the smaller blogs and post all the posts to the new Blog.

Miscellaneous

• Blogger allows custom domains so as WordPress. On WordPress the main blog resided on the WordPress and the traffic from the Custom Domain is transferred to WordPress Domain. But on the Blogger it is opposite for a good reason.
• No Google Adsense in here. Adsense is an easy way to have some revenues. (I have got $1.08 in last 8 months by clicking ads on my posts by mistake and they promise that as soon as it becomes $100 they will send me a check :) ).
• You have Blogroll on the WordPress, to add outside links and that’s about it. In the Blogger you have Layout Editor where you can add element and do it. You can have List, Link List, Picture, Text, and Code. Adsense, among others on left or the bottom of the blog Home page. I prefer the Blogger to WordPress in this department. It gives a lot more flexibility to edit all portions of your blog.
• WordPress has 52 themes to install compared to 38 on the Blogger. WordPress gives more flexibility with regard to the themes. The theme are better on the Blogger and I like more themes on it then WordPress. You can have sidebar widgets on the WordPress so as you can have some Widgets on the Blogger as well. I tried neither.
• Both Blogger and WordPress allow other members to post and edit the blog. Since I have no one else to do it except for me I don’t know much.
• The WordPress options seemed sanely more relevant compared to Blogger. However Blogger options are much more exhaustive in comparison. As I said earlier in Blogger you can change the name of the blog site, e.g. I change the blog address from GomzyPix to Gomzy Online on Blogger but I could not have done that on the WordPress, there I would have to create a different blog first, export the current blog and then import to the new blog.
  
• There is one more Upgrade facility in the WordPress where you can buy credits to have Custom CSS – Blogger you can upload your own theme or more space on the WordPress – I think it is pretty much unlimited on the Blogger.

So that’s how both stand up head to head and I think WordPress wins the battle on most of the grounds.