Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Wordpress

When I switched from the old Blogger to the New Blogger beta, I posted about some of the changes that they had made, and also touched on some of the things I liked and didn't like about the changes. Since then, I've had some time to work with the new Blogger, and I've noticed some annoyances. Recently, I was (slightly) involved in beck switching her blog from Typepad to Wordpress. In researching Wordpress' features, I noticed a few things that I liked, and I also recently noticed that it is possible to move an entire blog, comments and all, from Blogger to Wordpress without much trouble. So the question arises, should I switch to Wordpress? Here are some things that I like about blogging with Wordpress over Blogger:
  • Big Brother: Google gets to corrolate my blog with my search history, e-mail, my Google Checkout purchase history, etc. There are some parts of "the world's information" that I would like to keep unorganized and inaccessible, thank-you-very-much.
  • Login issues: whenever I log in to my e-mail account and the session expires, I get logged out of my blog. This is annoying, and it didn't happen before my Blogger account was absorbed into my Google account.
  • Web Statistics: Wordpress gives you excellent statistics, not only on traffic to your blog, but also on how many people are subscribed to your feeds. I use Webalizer and ClustrMaps to get something similar in nature, but I have no idea how many people are subscribed to my feeds or where else they come from.
At the same time, there are things that I still like about Blogger over Wordpress:
  • It requires no change: I'm already doing it.
  • Uploading pictures to Blogger posts with Picasa: it's easy, and the hosting is free (to a point).
  • Wordpress makes labels (tags/categories) as I use them less convenient, or at least so I hear. This is one feature that Blogger does quite well.
So far, I'm not annoyed enough to switch. If Google fixed the login/logout issues, I would be a lot less annoyed. If Wordpress were to start supporting the OpenID specification, it would be even more appealing, especially if Google didn't.

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