Thirteen Reasons Why WordPress is Superior To Blogger

Thir­teen Rea­sons Why Word­Press is Supe­rior To Blogger

An entry in Litemind’s Lists Group Writ­ing Project and included in Sec­ond Edi­tion of Word­Press Links at Word­Press Posts

I began blog­ging in March 2005. Being a neo­phyte, I signed up with Blog­ger because it was free and easy to use. But over time, as I learned more and more about blog­ging and, more impor­tantly, the blog­ging com­mu­nity, I found Blogger’s inher­ent lim­i­ta­tions extremely frus­trat­ing and, ulti­mately, unac­cept­able. I was spend­ing as much time hack­ing my blog, imple­ment­ing work-arounds in an effort to approx­i­mate the fea­tures that are built into Word­Press, as I was writ­ing content.

I migrated Col­lo­quium to Word­Press in early July 2007 and, in the process, spun some of my con­tent off into two spe­cial­ized sites, Here’s look­ing at … me! and Robert’s Legacy. It has not been a pain­less expe­ri­ence. The tran­si­tion was labor-intensive and I am still work­ing on for­mat­ting and other issues, mostly with the old­est con­tent. But mak­ing the move has proven to be the cor­rect deci­sion for me.

If you are think­ing about launch­ing a blog or con­sid­er­ing a move from one plat­form to the other, this list of fea­tures and char­ac­ter­is­tics that are unique to Word­Press may be use­ful and assist you in mak­ing a decision.

1. Arti­cle Excerpts

You just expe­ri­enced the first rea­son to use Word­Press. The “more” func­tion per­mits you to fea­ture excerpts of posts on the main page of your site. You can do so in Blog­ger by imple­ment­ing an “Expand­able Post” hack, but it requires line by line mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the tem­plate. There is a Word­Press plu­gin that will auto­mat­i­cally place an excerpt for each post con­tain­ing a pre­de­ter­mined num­ber of words on the front page for a com­pletely uni­form look. While I use excerpts, I pre­fer to con­trol where the break appears depend­ing on the flow of the content.

2. Sta­tic Pages

The abil­ity to cre­ate sta­tic pages is not built into Blog­ger, although a cou­ple of clever blog­gers devised com­pli­cated work-arounds that are far from perfect.

Once again, hack­ing a tem­plate involves spend­ing time tin­ker­ing with func­tion­al­ity that could be bet­ter invested in writ­ing qual­ity con­tent. Word­Press allows the cre­ation of sta­tic pages, one of which can be used as a front page. Click here to see an example.

3. Sched­uled Con­tent Publishing

The “edit time­stamp” fea­ture is a must-have option for folks like me who can’t be in front of the com­puter to hit “pub­lish” at the opti­mal moment. I write my con­tent on the week­ends or in the evening, tell Word­Press when to take it live and then focus on other activ­i­ties with the assur­ance that my arti­cles will appear at the pre­cise time specified.

4. Com­ment Relish

Vis­i­tors who com­ment for the first time receive a per­sonal e-mail from me thank­ing them for vis­it­ing Col­lo­quium and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the dia­log. This is accom­plished via the Com­ment Rel­ish plu­gin. Again, I do not have to be sit­ting in front of the com­puter to accom­plish this. The e-mail is gen­er­ated auto­mat­i­cally when the data­base detects that the com­ment author’s iden­tity is unique.

5. Top Com­men­ta­tors

Folks who leave com­ments are rewarded in the side­bar via the Top Com­men­ta­tor plu­gin. This is another way in which the num­ber of links among sites is increased. There is a great deal of other infor­ma­tion that can be col­lected and dis­played for vis­i­tors such as the list of most pop­u­lar arti­cles gen­er­ated using Alex King’s plugin.

6. Track­backs / Pings

There is no track­back / ping­ing sys­tem built into Blog­ger, so if you want to uti­lize those func­tions, you must imple­ment Haloscan. Yet again, instal­la­tion is time-consuming and not fool­proof, and you are required to invest time mod­i­fy­ing your blog to attain a func­tion that is already built into WordPress.

Haloscan track­back­ing requires that you visit the site you wish to track­back to, obtain the track­back address and then go to the Haloscan site, enter that address plus addi­tional infor­ma­tion and man­u­ally ping the site.

Using Word­Press allows a ping to be sent as soon as a post is pub­lished. For instance, the embed­ded links to the sites of the plu­gin devel­op­ers men­tioned above assures that those sites will be pinged when this arti­cle is pubished because Word­Press track­back addresses are iden­ti­cal to the post URL. Word­Press also includes a form imme­di­ately under the text edi­tor where addi­tional addresses can be added and pro­vides con­fir­ma­tion of the track­back. After pub­lish­ing, reopen the post in “edit” mode and you will see a list of sites to which track­backs were sent.

The text and graph­ics for­mat­ting options avail­able in Word­Press are lit­er­ally infinite.

7. Com­ment Retention

If you use Blog­ger, you can set­tle for its lim­ited com­ment­ing sys­tem or imple­ment Haloscan. But you can­not enjoy the ben­e­fits of both. When I began using Haloscan on my old Blog­ger site, I could no longer access all of the com­ments entered up to that point. Also, there is no way to import com­ments gath­ered on the Haloscan sys­tem into Word­Press other than copy­ing and past­ing them manually.

When I imported my old Blog­ger posts into Word­Press, I retrieved the pre-Haloscan com­ments, though. Unfor­tu­nately, they are dated and no longer cal­cu­lated by Tech­no­rati, accord­ing to the expla­na­tion I received from Dar­ren Rouse.

8. Themes

End­less vari­eties are avail­able. Far more than Blog­ger templates.

9. For­mat­ting Text and Graphics

Using plu­g­ins, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. Here are just two examples:

Among my favorite options? The abil­ity to quickly add pul­lquotes to an arti­cle. I imple­mented them using Blog­ger, but only after man­u­ally mod­i­fy­ing the template.

To add the pul­lquote you see in this arti­cle, I sim­ply added “</blockquote class=“right”>” before the text and closed it with “</blockquote>”.

Among my favorite writ­ing tools are foot­notes. To my knowl­edge, there is no way to add them to an arti­cle using Blogger.

10. Archives

For­get the lit­tle drop-down side­bar box list­ing arti­cles by month. Check out the expand­able archives by month page made pos­si­ble by the SRG Clean Archives plu­gin. And note that the archive is located on a sta­tic page!

11. Sitemap and “Author’s Favorites”

Aside from the sitemap you need to gen­er­ate so that all of the search engines can find your con­tent, a sitemap sit­u­ated on a sta­tic page like this one allows read­ers to scan the con­tests of your site in its entirety by page, month and topic, as well as find all avail­able feeds.

I pre­fer the page gen­er­ated using Alex King’s pop­u­lar­ity plu­gin which I have labeled “Author’s Favorites.” Arti­cles are listed there by cat­e­gory. Unlike a sitemap which auto­mat­i­cally lists all con­tent, cus­tom fields dic­tate what appears on this page. ¹

12. Data Backup

Fear a com­plete loss of data? You should. It can hap­pen and be dev­as­tat­ing. For that rea­son, you can and should back up your entire blog at reg­u­lar inter­vals. For­tu­nately, there are plu­g­ins avail­able that allow you to com­plete a full backup with just a cou­ple of clicks. I use Word­Press Data­base Backup which offers a num­ber of options: You can save the down­load file to a direc­tory on your server, your hard drive or e-mail it to your­self in a .zip file. You can also sched­ule reg­u­lar back­ups and they will be per­formed automatically.

13. SEO Opti­miza­tion and Tagging

This Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24, 2007, Word­Press 2.3 will be released. Among the promised improve­ments are “built-in tags sup­port, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redi­rec­tion.” I’m look­ing for­ward to see how the new ver­sion works.

1. “Author’s Favorites” is not yet com­plete. I am still refor­mat­ting and adding cus­tom fields to older arti­cles imported from Blogger.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Thurs­day Thirteen

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• A Thir­teen Ques­tion His­tory Quiz for Baby Boomers
• Thir­teen Obser­va­tions About Life
• Thir­teen More “Lesser Known” Help­ful Word­Press Plugins