Blogger vs WordPress

I had recently returned from a vacation and wanted a platform to showcase the story and the pictures that I took on the trip. According to No1Reviews.com (http://photo-sharing-websites.no1reviews.com/), the top 10 photo sharing sites are 1) SmugMug, 2) Phanfare, 3) Photobucket, 4) Flickr, 5) Picasa, 6) Shutterfly, 7) Snapfish, 8) Photobox 9) Kodak Gallery, and 10) Webshots. The site offers a detailed review from both the editor’s and user’s perspectives, screenshots and videos and a link to each site. Also included is a Buying Guide.

I really wanted to tell a story as well as illustrate it with the pictures I took. I’m not a professional photographer – I’d like to be but I’m not. I just try to frame my shots so that they’re pleasing to the eye. I avoid people eating food, sitting around a table, shooting into the sun and those impossible vista scenery pictures that are reduced to a line separating two colors.

Another thing I’m not interested in is being bombarded by offers to sell me services. Really, all I need is a place to tell a story and a place to put some selected shots that illustrate the adventure.

Way back in time, I originally created a web site using Front Page. What’s that, you may ask? Well, it’s a product that Microsoft acquired from Vulcan Technologies Incorporated back in the 1990’s. Careful, we’re dating ourselves, here. Those of you using Expression, will notice some hidden or not so hidden folders with “_vti” in the name. Now you know where these came from as well. Some things just never go completely away despite marketing campaigns to the contrary.

This blog is hosted on GoDaddy along with the Level7TechGroup.com web site. I use WordPress. It allow you to create static pages in addition to blogs and it lets you post pictures but I was also looking for a slideshow.

I also use Picasa. Picasa can create collages and slideshows and will let you post albums on Picasa Web Albums but I didn’t see a way to tell a story and I didn’t feel like captioning each picture. I also found out that Google has a blog called Blogspot.com that functions in a way similar to WordPress.

After reading the Top Ten review, I decided it would be a face-off or “throw down” between Google Picasa-Web Albums-Blogger and WordPress. The theme of the discussion will be How many “moving parts” do I need to get something simple accomplished?”

Let’s start with Google. Picasa does a marvelous job of inexpensive photo editing to cleanup pictures, and enhancing their visual appeal. You are also able to create an album which is merely a container with pointers to the pictures on disk. You have to sign up for the Google Picasa Web Album site but once you do, you can upload stuff. That stuff can be an album, a collage (JPG / JPEG) and/or a slideshow (WMV). You can share your web album and configure it’s privacy settings to control who may see the content.

By signing up for a blog site on Blogger, you will get an address on the blogspot.com domain where you can create blog posts and static pages and include pictures and other media. You create a blog by giving it a name that will be used as the URL. With Blogger the URL would be “myblog.blogspot.com.” Using WordPress, the URL would be “myblog.wordpress.com.” Your web hosting provider may support a stand-alone installation of a WordPress blog site; however, Blogger is not self-hosted. The stand-alone version of WordPress includes MySQL and the Apache web server. WordPress themes control the visual style of the hosted and self-hosted versions. From my perspective the WordPress theme is the greatest source of trouble and frustration with the product. Changing themes is a real problem as there is a low-level of common functionality, so if you switch themes lots of stuff can break and once it breaks in the new them means it’s broken in the old theme. If you want to revert back then you’ll be confronted with a manual repair job. Also on the subject of themes, a number of theme contributors have two versions: the free one and the premium version. Not all features are available in both versions. The Theme Directory lists them all and attempts to be descriptive; however it’s difficult to determine what you get until you activate the theme and then it may be too late.

You should be familiar with PHP and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Much of the support chatter centers around people tweaking code (CSS and/or PHP) with no context. Essentially, you’re eavesdropping on a private conversation. While WordPress and Google are what I consider to be umbrella organizations for development, support, hosting and marketing, the documentation is strictly community based which leads to a great deal of frustration when you’re trying to find an answer to a “How to question” or resolve a problem.

I found that not to be the case with using the limited choices of themes available in Blogger. That being said, both WordPress and BlogSpot will allow you to create multiple blogs using the same logon ID with the hosted version. I also found the Google community’s displeasure at the fact that there is no way to directly contact Google on support issues. The community forum is the only one available. Also, the forum is filled with outdated and misleading posts. I would rate it as -10 on a ten point scale.

Due to file size, both blogs discourage uploads of large video files. What is large? WordPress has an 8MB upload file size. If it’s larger than that, it goes through the motion but nothing gets uploaded. It’s better to post the video in YouTube and embed the URL. Most video sharing sites have a button that will generate the html code that you can copy and paste into your blog.

With Blogger, there seems to be a limit of 1GB total space per blog. If it fits then you’re golden otherwise look to a different place to store your video. With Blogger, it could be Picasa Web Albums or YouTube. You’ll need to register your Google account for access.

Both WordPress and Blogger support static pages. Static pages are basically not blog posts. Blogger has a limit of 20 static pages. WordPress has no apparent limitation. Both allow for placement in predefined areas in the theme template. Both widgets let you control the order in which the pages are displayed; however, WordPress lets you nest pages. Both will allow you to embed links in your pages to set up any type of navigation.

In summary, let me say that there are a number of posts comparing Blogger and WordPress. I personally think that there are a lot of moving parts associated with Blogger, while WordPress is oriented toward the more serious developer types familiar with PHP and CSS and willing to search through their support forums. Perhaps the best and simplest comparison is from a Paul Santosh who posts at http://hellboundbloggers.com/2011/07/12/blogger-vs-wordpress/. Here it is:

Blogger suits you if:

• You want to invest less
• You want to make it professional with your CSS & XHTML skills
• You don’t want guest authors
• You don’t want multiple authors unless you know them personally(as there is no “Submit for Review” option)
• You want to be good in SEO with great effect(like adding the image alt tags manually)
• Even my site is blogger hosted! Because I don’t wanna invest more on my blog unless I get more traffic and earnings!

WordPress suits you if:

• You want to have a professional look and don’t have any knolwedge of CSS or HTML.
• You want to invest more on your blog.
• You want to have guest authors ,even you may not know them personally.
• You want to be good in SEO with less effort.
• You want to show your professionalism!

Have fun and hopefully less frustration whichever platform you choose.