Blogger Struggles Against Offerings from WordPress

I continue to run across blog articles discussing the pros and cons of using  Blogger and WordPress (both free and self-hosted). Though it might not be fair to compare the paid WordPress to the free Blogger platform, some of the points made in this first post apply to WordPress.com, (the free service) also.

From Blog Godown - Why You Should Convert Your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted Wordpress provides an argument that I don't see often:

Multi-Author Blogs and Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging and Multi Author blogging is a mess in Blogger, because there is no way to moderate posts submitted by other authors. In comparison to this, Wordpress has the ability to moderate posts and also assign roles to content submitters as Authors, Contributors or Admin. This way you can easily control and decide which authors should be moderated and which should be allowed to have full control.

 Gautam, the author further explains in his reply to my comment:

That is because i have faced problems with guest blogging in blogger and wordpress has a lot of features that make it a better platform for guest and multi author blogging

Another point from Gautam's post addresses the issue of SEO which enables your blog to be found by users of search engines like Google and Bing.

In Blogger, you can do SEO for images and Posts by adding the the meta keywords and alt tags for each post manually. 

For those that are familiar with meta-tagging, please let me know how that is working for you.

In a post from Robert Bravery of Integral Web Solutions Which is better Blogger.com vs. Wordpress.com? cites ease of blog importing as one of many reasons to use WordPress.com

Blog Import: In Blogger - limited availability to import and export only in the same blogging platform; in WordPress - you can import from several other platforms, including from Blogger.

Michael Aulia of Craving Tech wrote an article for NuffNang Australia called Better Blogging - Wordpress vs. Blogger offers another free Blogger vs. paid WordPress comparison. However, he points out something worth mentioning, about adding "static pages" which is also true for the free version of WordPress.

• Static Pages

With WordPress, it’s easy to add custom pages such as “About me”, “Contact”, and other pages. All WordPress themes automatically display all pages so you don’t have to do anything to display your new pages on the blog.

I'll end this post on a lighter note with an argument from my friend Kissie, from the Ohhh.... K!
in a post called What November Taught Me. Let me explain first that in this excerpt is taken from Blogger and she is talking about...well see for yourself.

I purchased business cards to announce a vision, promote this site, aim for an audience, and have my contact information handy to share. What I didn’t consider when I added the site was everyone who gets the card could very well visit the site….that means I can’t WRITE ABOUT THEM and boy do I have some things to say. Of course I dedicated this page to my grandchildren so I have to be nice and sweet and try to always share a nugget of wisdom. So, the lesson is to start a new blog and not tell my friends and family about that one. It’s on now! (That’s slang for I am going to let it rip.)

I'm looking forward to Kissie's move to her new home at WordPress.com. Feel free to share any insights on the Blogger vs. WordPress issue in the comments below!

Please visit my primary blog Ms. Ileane Speaks and follow me on Twitter @Ileane 

Tag Surfer - Blogger vs. WordPress.com

I'm more familiar with WordPress.com, therefore it will be better for me to discuss the WordPress.com features that I find useful first. Eventually I might find that Blogger has similar tools that I am not aware of. I'll start things off with my Tool of the Day - Tag Surfer.

In WordPress.com you can create tags which appear at the end of your post. You create them yourself, so you can spell them however you like, but if you make a typo it's on you. Adding and deleting them is quite simplistic. The very first post you add tags to WordPress.com will automatically put those tags on your tag surfer list but you can change them as you wish.

From the My Account dashboard click on tag surfer and you will see a list of posts from other WordPress.com bloggers using the same tags. This is great, because it gives you the opportunity to read what others are thinking about the same topic that you have interest in and it's a great way to connect. The biggest advantage for me is that you can also add something to your tag list that you are thinking about blogging about or that your friend is blogging about or - just anything else your heart desires.

In the last 2 days I found 2 very resourceful blogs this way.
http://theoldsilly.com/
http://bloodywellwrite.com/
I would not have found these without the tag surfer tool, well at least not as quickly and easily. You can set the parameters of the tag list, such as how many posts will be returned and how many days in the past you would like to search. I like this flexibility because I had way too many posts appear when I tagged Jupiter (turns out there are tons of Jupiter lovers out there), and John Coltrane. So I just deleted them from my tag surfer list (which did not remove the tag from my posts) and added something new to the list like Bing.

If Blogger has a similar tool, I can't wait to see the results. But at this rate, I'll never find it because I am going back over to my WordPress.com blog. Bye for now.

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