This is why I cross-post: I like the techie side of going in to self-host a Wordpress blog because I can have a personalized template and I like the free, easy interface of the Blogger site. But now that I’ve played with Wordpress.com, and while the site is very nice looking, there are a lot of scripts you can’t use. With a self-hosted WP blog you can do pretty much what you want but when you have unreliable web hosting issues as I always have (I’m not willing to pay a ton for this) then the site can go down and no amount of backup guarantees you can restore the blog in MySQL.
So that brings up back to Blogger which I used back in the day. I’m honestly surprised that it’s lasted this long and is that popular. I’ve asked online why people use it so much more than Wordpress and I’ve that it’s easier. Granted, I see that, but it’s the look that bugs me. The template designer is nice after I played with it for bit. It’s definitely much better than the old school templates they had before. I’ve also heard that since Blogger is tied into their Google account, then users can stay logged in for GMail, Google Reader, Blogger, and the other tools offered. I, personally, haven’t used all that Google has to their credit, but I understand why users want to keep this up.
My guess is it’s a work-based situation where they can log into Google. We never could at the public schools but maybe with the impending need for Web 2.0 resources, teachers and school librarians are allowed to have openly running Google accounts at their work computers.
Wordpress has also been tagged as “tough” or “for professionals” which I don’t really agree with entirely. Granted I’ve messed with the installation side of it and it’s quite easy once you’ve done it a couple of times. Especially with so many people needing to be web designers as part of their profession, I’m not sure why it’s not used by them as much. It’s the top rated blog service but I see tons of bloggers not using it.
Blogger has a “easy” look about it that puts me off a bit. It doesn’t scream “authority” to me. It looks like it is what it is: a free blog. Again, however, it is way, way better than it use to be. I still remember that pink template they used for years – how I loved that! At least now I have a revamped version of my beloved pink blog template.
With this all said, I’m going to link myself up to the site through Blogger for a while. The minute I ever update I get a comment either on this site or the Unfinished Book Reviews site. With Wordpress it’s once in a while for comments and a bunch of spam related references bringing traffic to the site (thank you, Wassup Stats). So the ability to have actual readers, commenters and followers on my site will happen in Blogger, it seems. I had a whopping 11 followers on Endeavours of Librarianship before I stopped using it in May.
Granted, I still don’t absolutely love the site on Blogger but it’s growing on me. At least I can run the scripts I want (most of them at least) here and I don’t have to worry about backups. I’m curious if all this work will be worth it. I’ll get back to you on that. Until then please read, follow, subscribe, share and most importantly: enjoy!
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