Blogger or WordPress?May 2007 | If you want to set up a free hosted blog there are a large number of services to choose from. This article is about the easiest one to use (Blogger.com) and the most versatile system (Wordpress.com). If you have web space with unrestricted FTP access, Blogger can upload your blog to that address. If you have web space with PHP and MySQL, you can install WordPress on your own site without the need to sign up at Wordpress.com. The original BlogSpot publishing system was slower than Wordpress. If you made a minor change to your template and decided to republish the entire blog it could take several minutes, depending on the number of entries. The new Blogger system overcomes this problem by generating pages dynamically. You'll need a Google Account to use it. Both Blogger and Wordpress can be configured to allow visitors to post comments, and both have features to moderate comments and combat spam. Blogger is easier to useThe BlogSpot system has fewer configuration settings than Wordpress. However, if you want to set up a team blog, or allow user participation, WordPress can assign different roles to individual members:
You can set up team blogs on Blogger, but there are only two roles: Administrators and non-Administrators. |
Setting up your blog
A wide selection of themes are available for WordPress users. When you sign up with Blogger you have an initial choice of 12 themes, but you can choose from a larger selection later on, and third-party themes are available too. Wordpress.com admin dashboard
The layout of the Blogger admin dashboard is similar. See a comparison of Blogger and Wordpress.com features in a summary table. The number of blogs worldwideIn February 2006, the Blog Herald estimated that there were 200 million blogs in existence. What are the chances of receiving a large number of visitors each month if you set up a new blog? Quality content is the key. If the content has a wide appeal, or caters to a special interest group that isn't covered already, the chances are good. But it's crucial to use an automated blog update notification service. On the Blogger dashboard choose Settings --> Publishing, and select "Notify Weblogs.com." WordPress does it automatically via Pingomatic.com. BoingBoing is often cited as one of the Top 10 most visited blogs. It receives around 10 million visits each month. The graph below shows the likely readership distribution curve for all blogs worldwide. A very small number of blogs receive a huge number of visitors, while the vast majority are lucky to receive a few dozen visitors each month. The graph scale is logarithmic:
|
Choosing the blog name
At Wordpress.com your blog address will be
username.wordpress.com Before signing up for a free hosted blog it's a good idea to prepare a very long list of alternative names for the blog address. Changing your themeBlogger allows its users to change the layout and styles of their blogs. At Wordpress.com a small selection of themes have limited customization options, but otherwise you would have to pay for the "Custom CSS" upgrade. That's a frustrating restriction because far too many of the WP themes use tiny fonts, and some have CSS bugs which prevent them from being fully compatible with all web browsers at all screen resolutions. At this link you can see actual size screenshots of WordPress themes. And here is a tutorial on how to edit a BlogSpot template. Unfortunately, not all web browsers interpret CSS in exactly the same way. For example, Internet Explorer has a problem rendering dotted borders:
An easy fix is to change the "dotted" attribute to "solid" within the CSS <style> section of the blog template. Home: Free trackers and hit counters for your blog.
|
