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.

Review of Lisa Louise Cooke's session: Genealogy Podcasts and Blogs 101

Just got done watching Lisa Louise Cooke’s session, entitled: Genealogy Podcasts and Blogs 101 that was broadcast free from RootsTech 2012.  Yesterday, I had watched Josh Coates’ Keynote Address and was quite impressed with the whole RootsTech conference.  In case you're not familiar with RootsTech, it's basically a conference where technology and genealogy people converge and share what's new in their prospective industries. This conference occurs annually in Salt Lake City, Utah typically in February or March.

Last year, at a staff meeting of the society that I work for our president talked to us in depth about the sessions she had attended, ideas, and genealogy and/or tech projects that were going on out in the world.  I was truly blown away after hearing what people were doing on the planet.

This year, I learned that RootsTech was going to be broadcasting select sessions live and these would be free.  I was very excited that even though I wasn’t able to attend this conference in person that these Keynote Addresses and sessions would be available to others and me.  Also, I wouldn’t have to wait around to hear about the cool techie things from someone else.

I had read previously about podcasts, blogs, and webinars in Drew Smith’s book about social networking in genealogy.  His book was the impetus for me in starting this blog in the first place.  After reading his book and talking with others at work, I looked into genealogy webinars and honestly I wasn’t that impressed with what I found. 

Now after watching Ms. Cooke’s session, who is the person behind Genealogy Gems, I will definitely look into genealogy podcasts and maybe even try to seek out some genealogy related videos as well. 

On a side note, one of the members of my knitting group recently introduced me to knitting how-to videos.  So I really see that the information in whatever subject you’re interested in is out there online—it’s just up to you to find it!

Back to Ms. Cooke’s session, I hadn’t anticipated that I would be that interested in her section about podcasts and the real draw for me was to see what she had to say about blogs, since I obviously have one.  I was quite surprised by what I learned about podcasts.  She did give me some good tips about my own blog and I’ll have to test those out.  One of the suggestions she made was that if you have a genealogy blog, to only post genealogy related items on your blog.  This got me to thinking that perhaps I should break up my own blog into several other blogs where the focus is on one hobby only.  I’m not really thrilled with that idea, but perhaps those of you who read my posts on a regular basis have your own thoughts on the subject.  My thought was to somehow categorize my posts and archived posts into sections so that someone who was only interested in one of my hobbies could just click to read posts about that subject.

I only have one criticism about Ms. Cooke’s session and that was when she started talking about Google blog searching and mentioned that this was a new feature.  My experience with searching blogs on Google has been that they’ve had the blog searching function for a long time now and this wasn’t something new as she mentioned this morning.  Nonetheless, the content of her sessions was very good and well presented. 

The thought of course crossed my mind listening to Ms. Cooke talk about podcasts that I should make my Womble and other genealogy related blog posts into podcasts.  However, I’m not quite sure how great my recorded voice would sound to the rest of the world?  One of my hopes with creating this blog was that I would meet people who were researching the Womble family or the same line I am and contact me.  Another was that interested family members would stay up-to-date with my family history research and give me feedback on my findings.

I will definitely do some more research into podcasts and perhaps become a podcaster due to Ms. Cooke’s session.  If this happens, and you’re interested please keep looking for news about this on this blog.  This will be where I will let you all know of any future podcasting or any great podcasts that I find out there in the online universe.

Review of Lisa Louise Cooke's session: Genealogy Podcasts and Blogs 101

Just got done watching Lisa Louise Cooke’s session, entitled: Genealogy Podcasts and Blogs 101 that was broadcast free from RootsTech 2012.  Yesterday, I had watched Josh Coates’ Keynote Address and was quite impressed with the whole RootsTech conference.  In case you're not familiar with RootsTech, it's basically a conference where technology and genealogy people converge and share what's new in their prospective industries. This conference occurs annually in Salt Lake City, Utah typically in February or March.

Last year, at a staff meeting of the society that I work for our president talked to us in depth about the sessions she had attended, ideas, and genealogy and/or tech projects that were going on out in the world.  I was truly blown away after hearing what people were doing on the planet.

This year, I learned that RootsTech was going to be broadcasting select sessions live and these would be free.  I was very excited that even though I wasn’t able to attend this conference in person that these Keynote Addresses and sessions would be available to others and me.  Also, I wouldn’t have to wait around to hear about the cool techie things from someone else.

I had read previously about podcasts, blogs, and webinars in Drew Smith’s book about social networking in genealogy.  His book was the impetus for me in starting this blog in the first place.  After reading his book and talking with others at work, I looked into genealogy webinars and honestly I wasn’t that impressed with what I found. 

Now after watching Ms. Cooke’s session, who is the person behind Genealogy Gems, I will definitely look into genealogy podcasts and maybe even try to seek out some genealogy related videos as well. 

On a side note, one of the members of my knitting group recently introduced me to knitting how-to videos.  So I really see that the information in whatever subject you’re interested in is out there online—it’s just up to you to find it!

Back to Ms. Cooke’s session, I hadn’t anticipated that I would be that interested in her section about podcasts and the real draw for me was to see what she had to say about blogs, since I obviously have one.  I was quite surprised by what I learned about podcasts.  She did give me some good tips about my own blog and I’ll have to test those out.  One of the suggestions she made was that if you have a genealogy blog, to only post genealogy related items on your blog.  This got me to thinking that perhaps I should break up my own blog into several other blogs where the focus is on one hobby only.  I’m not really thrilled with that idea, but perhaps those of you who read my posts on a regular basis have your own thoughts on the subject.  My thought was to somehow categorize my posts and archived posts into sections so that someone who was only interested in one of my hobbies could just click to read posts about that subject.

I only have one criticism about Ms. Cooke’s session and that was when she started talking about Google blog searching and mentioned that this was a new feature.  My experience with searching blogs on Google has been that they’ve had the blog searching function for a long time now and this wasn’t something new as she mentioned this morning.  Nonetheless, the content of her sessions was very good and well presented. 

The thought of course crossed my mind listening to Ms. Cooke talk about podcasts that I should make my Womble and other genealogy related blog posts into podcasts.  However, I’m not quite sure how great my recorded voice would sound to the rest of the world?  One of my hopes with creating this blog was that I would meet people who were researching the Womble family or the same line I am and contact me.  Another was that interested family members would stay up-to-date with my family history research and give me feedback on my findings. 

I will definitely do some more research into podcasts and perhaps become a podcaster due to Ms. Cooke’s session.  If this happens, and you’re interested please keep looking for news about this on this blog.  This will be where I will let you all know of any future podcasting or any great podcasts that I find out there in the online universe.