It’s been a few months now since I made the transition from Blogspot to Wordpress, and I’m a happy camper. :) Having blogged from Blogspot for a long time, I’m in a strong position to compare the two writing platforms.
Price
The big advantage of blogspot is, it’s totally free. Of course, WP is free as well, but to take full advantage of all its power and flexibility, you will need a professional webhost (Glowing Face Man is currently hosted by BlueHost, and it seems to be a pretty good host so far). You can get free hosting from wordpress.com, but you won’t be able to customize like you can with a professionally hosted blog. Blogspot allows you to run ads on your free blog, but wordpress.com does not.
Learning Curve
Blogspot has a much smaller learning curve. I had to manually edit the mysql databases just to get my installation of wordpress to work (granted that’s because I was doing some weird juggling with domain names during the transition so that glowingfaceman.com wouldn’t go down while I was moving it, but still…) Then again, a small learning curve is often a siren, suggesting a long-term trade-off, and indeed that is the case here. Easy to pick up initially, Blogspot is like a bicycle with training wheels welded on which you’ll never be able to remove.
Search-Engine Optimization
If you actually want your articles to reach the outside world, Blogspot puts you at a crippling disadvantage right out the gate. This might seem surprising, since it’s owned by Google, the leading search engine. Well, at least you can’t accuse The Big G of being biased against its own products. A Blogspot blog won’t send pingbacks to other bloggers when you link to their articles. In the heavily community-based blogosphere, that’s like driving a car with no headlights. With Blogspot, you can’t fully take advantage of Google’s own Webmaster Tools: there’s no way to make a legitimate Google Sitemap, there’s no way to add Google’s enhanced 404 page widget, heck, you can’t even control your robots.txt file.
Worst of all, with blogspot, you have no control over your URL structure. They decided it’s best to build the date into every single article URL. For example, if I published this article on my old Blogspot blog, the url might look like: http://www.glowingfaceman.com/2009/11/blogspot-vs-wordpress.html. This might be useful if your name is Markos Moulitsas and you publish 100 articles a day, but for the rest of us, it’s just clutter, and most SEO gurus think those extra folders hurt the article’s performance in the search engines. By contrast, on Wordpress, you can customize your URL layout, and you can edit the URL for an article as you write it (whereas Blogspot generates one with no input from you).
Customization
A professionally hosted Wordpress blog beats the tar our of Blogspot when it comes to customization. Blogspot is customizable to the extent that you can edit your “template”, a script in a bizarre language which is half XHTML and half some strange very-poorly-documented command-interface for XHTML (with commands like “” and “”). Even if you manage to learn the ins-and-outs of this weird scripting language, you’re still severely limited in what you can do with it, because all the “variables” are pre-loaded in a way you can’t control. For example, you cannot directly access the whole list of your posts: the posts variable is pre-loaded with whatever posts Blogger *thinks* you should have access to based on what page it is. A simple example of how limited blogspot customization is: noone has yet figured out a way to change the “Next Article” and “Previous Article” links to actually have the name of the articles in question. That ought to be trivial, but it seems to be impossible.
Wordpress? The entire program is open-source, written in PHP, and you can edit absolutely everything. The only limit is your knowledge of PHP, and even without that, there are thousands of community-generated plugins, which you can install with the click of a button. Unlike blogspot’s clunky undocumented “B:” language, there are hundreds of books and free tutorials on PHP.
Support
Wordpress has a great support community, with very active forums full of very helpful people. The open-source, transparent nature of WP makes it easy for the advanced user to help the newbie. Even if Blogspot had such a community, in many cases there would be nothing the experts could say except “Sorry, that’s impossible.” The Blogspot community seems to be extremely poor, a wasteland of unanswered questions with the occasional Google employee popping up to say nothing of much use. Much as I love Google, they’re about as transparent as the silt at the bottom of Challenger Deep. Great for thwarting spammers and creating an awesome search engine. Not so great for helping you find blogging solutions.
Overall Conclusion
Blogspot is the platform of choice if you just want to make a very simple blog with nothing fancy. It’s easy to set up, easy to learn the basics, and you can broadcast your “Hello, World” within ten minutes of making your free account. If you have bigger ambitions and want to really take your blog to the next level, Wordpress wins hands down.
A Closing Note about Blogspot
I realize that I came off a little harsh against Blogspot, but actually I do really appreciate what they do. The number of blogs they host is vast and enormous, and they do that for absolutely free– a huge value and a model for other companies to follow. I want to emphasize, the reason Blogspot is so cripplingly limited is not because of incompetence or anything like that. In order to provide the service they provide, they need a system which is extremely scalable. They couldn’t do it if they gave all their writers unlimited access to PHP and SQL. Viewed as an individual blog, Blogspot is not very impressive, but viewed as the centralized supercollection of blogs which it is, it’s an engineering marvel.
Source : http://www.xamuel.com/blogspot-vs-wordpress/
Price
The big advantage of blogspot is, it’s totally free. Of course, WP is free as well, but to take full advantage of all its power and flexibility, you will need a professional webhost (Glowing Face Man is currently hosted by BlueHost, and it seems to be a pretty good host so far). You can get free hosting from wordpress.com, but you won’t be able to customize like you can with a professionally hosted blog. Blogspot allows you to run ads on your free blog, but wordpress.com does not.
Learning Curve
Blogspot has a much smaller learning curve. I had to manually edit the mysql databases just to get my installation of wordpress to work (granted that’s because I was doing some weird juggling with domain names during the transition so that glowingfaceman.com wouldn’t go down while I was moving it, but still…) Then again, a small learning curve is often a siren, suggesting a long-term trade-off, and indeed that is the case here. Easy to pick up initially, Blogspot is like a bicycle with training wheels welded on which you’ll never be able to remove.
Search-Engine Optimization
If you actually want your articles to reach the outside world, Blogspot puts you at a crippling disadvantage right out the gate. This might seem surprising, since it’s owned by Google, the leading search engine. Well, at least you can’t accuse The Big G of being biased against its own products. A Blogspot blog won’t send pingbacks to other bloggers when you link to their articles. In the heavily community-based blogosphere, that’s like driving a car with no headlights. With Blogspot, you can’t fully take advantage of Google’s own Webmaster Tools: there’s no way to make a legitimate Google Sitemap, there’s no way to add Google’s enhanced 404 page widget, heck, you can’t even control your robots.txt file.
Worst of all, with blogspot, you have no control over your URL structure. They decided it’s best to build the date into every single article URL. For example, if I published this article on my old Blogspot blog, the url might look like: http://www.glowingfaceman.com/2009/11/blogspot-vs-wordpress.html. This might be useful if your name is Markos Moulitsas and you publish 100 articles a day, but for the rest of us, it’s just clutter, and most SEO gurus think those extra folders hurt the article’s performance in the search engines. By contrast, on Wordpress, you can customize your URL layout, and you can edit the URL for an article as you write it (whereas Blogspot generates one with no input from you).
Customization
A professionally hosted Wordpress blog beats the tar our of Blogspot when it comes to customization. Blogspot is customizable to the extent that you can edit your “template”, a script in a bizarre language which is half XHTML and half some strange very-poorly-documented command-interface for XHTML (with commands like “
Wordpress? The entire program is open-source, written in PHP, and you can edit absolutely everything. The only limit is your knowledge of PHP, and even without that, there are thousands of community-generated plugins, which you can install with the click of a button. Unlike blogspot’s clunky undocumented “B:” language, there are hundreds of books and free tutorials on PHP.
Support
Wordpress has a great support community, with very active forums full of very helpful people. The open-source, transparent nature of WP makes it easy for the advanced user to help the newbie. Even if Blogspot had such a community, in many cases there would be nothing the experts could say except “Sorry, that’s impossible.” The Blogspot community seems to be extremely poor, a wasteland of unanswered questions with the occasional Google employee popping up to say nothing of much use. Much as I love Google, they’re about as transparent as the silt at the bottom of Challenger Deep. Great for thwarting spammers and creating an awesome search engine. Not so great for helping you find blogging solutions.
Overall Conclusion
Blogspot is the platform of choice if you just want to make a very simple blog with nothing fancy. It’s easy to set up, easy to learn the basics, and you can broadcast your “Hello, World” within ten minutes of making your free account. If you have bigger ambitions and want to really take your blog to the next level, Wordpress wins hands down.
A Closing Note about Blogspot
I realize that I came off a little harsh against Blogspot, but actually I do really appreciate what they do. The number of blogs they host is vast and enormous, and they do that for absolutely free– a huge value and a model for other companies to follow. I want to emphasize, the reason Blogspot is so cripplingly limited is not because of incompetence or anything like that. In order to provide the service they provide, they need a system which is extremely scalable. They couldn’t do it if they gave all their writers unlimited access to PHP and SQL. Viewed as an individual blog, Blogspot is not very impressive, but viewed as the centralized supercollection of blogs which it is, it’s an engineering marvel.
Source : http://www.xamuel.com/blogspot-vs-wordpress/
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