Blogger vs. Wordpress

Please note:  this post has nothing to do about genealogy or any of my other hobbies.  It is merely my personal comparison of blogger and wordpress.  It is not meant as a slam or praise for or against either blogging platform.

I’ve had this blog since March 2011 and in it I’ve tried to recount what I’ve discovered while doing genealogy and activities in my other hobbies.  My reason for beginning it was to let those who were interested know what progress I’d made with my genealogy.  Also, I’d hoped that it might be a way to communicate with others researching the same family line(s).

My reason for why I chose blogger was because it appeared to be the most simplistic and straightforward.  I considered using wordpress, but didn’t mainly because it seemed too complex for me.  While I consider myself to be somewhat tech savvy, I’m by no means an advanced user of tech or fantastic at HTML coding.  

Since going with blogger for my blog, I’ve become a bit annoyed at some of the functionality of it.  Mainly the function of adding pictures to my posts has become problematic for me.  At first, I believed that it was the browser I was using, since I used Opera and knew that not everything worked well or rendered as it should with that browser.  Since switching over to Firefox, this wonkiness when adding pictures hasn’t improved.  What I’ve had happen to me when adding photos is that I upload photos from my computer that I want to include in my post and then click on “one” of the uploaded images to insert it in a specific place in the post.  This has resulted in all of the photos that I’ve uploaded for my post being added instead of just the one image.

The work around that I came up with was to first upload the images I wanted to use for a post into Google+/Picasa and then inserted them from there instead of uploading them from my pc.  This worked okay for this post.  However, I did encounter an interesting hiccup with this system.

Recently, I looked more closely at wordpress and am strongly considering switching the location of my blog over to that platform.  I found in tinkering around with wordpress that I could easily add photos to my posts and this was extremely pleasing to me.  However, my one gripe with wordpress is having rather frequent reminders that the platform seems to operate as a “for pay” platform.  So, any customization of my blog requires one to pay a fee or fees in order to alter the appearance or have access to more features.

I understand that there’s nothing wrong in companies making money.  And I’m familiar with the mantra of “you get what you pay for,” but it’s rather tiresome when one is attempting to familiarize themselves with a new service or platform and is told that what one wants to do can’t be done with out paying.

In order to truly understand what wordpress has to offer me for free, I got a book on it from my local library.  After a cursory look at it today, it hasn't shown me at the time of writing this post a way to circumvent the wordpress pay wall.  The book did seem to allude to the fact that not everything in wordpress is free and even hinted that only a portion of the platform's offerings are free. 

If it turns out that there’s no way to circumvent the pay wall, then I can always continue to use blogger and since I’ve been able to tinker with the appearance more, are able to include CSS for free, and this is where my readers can find me then perhaps my blog’s home will remain on blogger.

I found that adding photos with wordpress wasn't quite as easy as I'd thought it would be.  As I mentioned, I first uploaded the images into Google+/Picasa before inserting them into my post.  Wordpress didn't have any access to Google+/Picasa, so I had to find another way to obtain my photos that were stuck in almost a bizarre purgatory manifested as Google+/Picasa.  I was able to retrieve the images by downloading them from there and saving them to a folder on my pc and then adding them to my wordpress post.  So this wasn't exactly the convenience and ease I was hoping for.