The first step towards blogging is having an idea/thought to blog about. You can take any & every topic under the sun and make it interesting by your write ups. Blog is a place where you can have your own democracy. You can write, publicize and use it for your own as well as everyone’s good. Questions to ask yourself before you select any topic to blog are as follows:
- 1) What do you know about it?
- 2) Do you wish to promote, present, sell, publicize or create awareness?
- 3) How long do you plan to run the blog? Whether it’s a blog having a time limit to some Event (e.g. Olympics), a newsreel (Citizen Reporter), a static blog full of info, a travelogue, a community blog with discussions, a tutorial or learning blog, a personal blog or your own unique kind?
- 4) How do you categorize you blog? Find various categories in DMOZ, craiglist or Indiblogger. You can also refer other famous Blog sites like Technorati or Alexa.
- 5) How much you enjoy doing this?
Having decided a Blog Topic, comes the most important task of choice of Blogging Platform. Most popular Blogging Platforms are Live Journal, Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad but the choice really distills down to choosing between Blogger or Wordpress .
Blogger is powered by Google. So you know that all your Google services (Be it Picasa, Adsense, Reader, Analytics, Webmaster Central, SMS Channel, Gadgets, Search etc) can be coupled with your blog within no time. Blogger provided infinite customization and you can really have complete control over the look and feel of you blog here. With Google’s new Friend Connect Gadget Series, You can have the most awaited link between your Social Network and Web Audience. With Blogger you can endlessly edit themes, customize interface and experiment with new SEO techniques since you have direct access to your Theme Template Code.
Wordpress comes in two flavors: wordpress.com and wordpress.org . The first one (wordpress.com) is free Blogging platform powered by Wordpress (An Automattic Enterprise) which allows you to make your own blog and run it on wordpress servers. Wordpress is multiuser Blogging software that allows everyone to make blog, customize it (to some extent) and run it. Whereas wordpress.org is single user version of Wordpress.com Open Source Blogging Software provided by Wordpress for individual use that you can deploy on you Web server. What this means is that if you have bought Hosting Services from some Provider then you can use wordpress.org Software (The latest being Ver2.8.6.1) to have Wordpress Blog running your site/blog. In case, you don’t have one – no need to worry. You still have the free wordpress.com Blogging Platform to host your blogs.
We will be concentrating on Wordpress.com for now and later move on to wordpress.org!
Wordpress doesn’t provide much customizations and control over the interface and working. It has very simple and one of the best detailed blogging dashboard. It’s a good choice for a blogger who doesn’t want to get into technicalities of xhtml or CSS and simply want to blog without worrying much about technical aspect of the blogging. The power of Wordpress lies in its audience. Since wordpress.com doesn’t allow advertising, There are very less splogs (Spam + Blog = Splogs) on wordpress.com as compared to Blogger where Splogs swarm for money. May be that’s the reason behind the serious audience of wordpress.com and high Page rank of its Tags. If you are a frequent Googler (which we all are in some sense!), you will find many searches ending up with results like “/wordpress/SearchTerm”. The SearchTerm here refers to the keyword you searched for in Google and the Post on wordpress.com that were tagged with that particular SearchTerm. These wordpress tags conceal lots of potential; the same tag with same content on any other Blogging Platform would be far behind in Search Results on Google. This is my personal view and should not be taken for a fact.
Wordpress also has a very good Commenting System. It acquired Intense Debate – a corporation known for its Comment Services last year only. Because of less power in user’s hand, Wordpress blogs have a clean look and run mostly on quality contents instead of SEO tricks. So if you are a writer or produce content, Wordpress is the best place to be discovered. The very simplicity of wordpress.com becomes the reason why the advanced users don’t prefer it. For those who want the power in their hands, Blogger is the perfect weapon!
Besides the above basic features, the following features also play an important role:
- 1.) Back Up
- 2.) Export/Import
- 3.) Permitted Widgets
- 4.) Stat System
- 5.) TOS (Terms of Services)
From now on Wordpress refers to wordpress.com ; wherever I need to mention wordpress.org I will mention it explicitly.
1.) Both Blogger and Wordpress don’t have satisfactory back up options. In case your blog is banned for reason or the other, your whole data just vanishes into thin air! I prefer Blog Backup Online for real time backup of my blog. Blog Backup Online provides space up to 50 MB for backup storage in free edition. You can also download a copy of backups and save it on your hard disk.
2.) Blogger and Wordpress both give a content backup of Style and Content in XML format for download. Wordpress gives the backup for download in its new WXR (Wordpress XML) format that is not compatible with Blogger Export/Import Tool. Thus Blogger provides better migration options.
3.) Blogger features numerous Widgets (mostly free) for your Blogger Blogs while on Wordpress there are few limited widgets which although being complete in it self leave much to be desired.
4.) An inbuilt Stat System is one thing that Blogger has been missing since the dawn of Blogging era. We have to look forward to free Web Stats services like Hitstas, freecounter etc for Web Statistics. In this field, Wordpress outruns Blogger. Wordpress gives one of the best in class web stats tracking system which feature day by day report, comparison, most read, hot on wordpress and its own personal ranking to blogs. It has detailed Day-Basis, Monthly-Basis and Annual stats. It also shows most searched keywords, incoming and outgoing links, most popular posts and trackbacks in its stats page on Dashboard. It’s like having an interface of Google Webmaster Central within your Wordpress Dashboard. No doubt Wordpress outruns Blogger in Stat domain.
5.) TOS (Terms of Services) are yet another overlooked part while deciding the platform for Blogging. They do matter a lot and in the long run, it’s the TOS part that gets you banned and there’s no way out. However, if you have been smart enough to have a Blog Backup Online account connected to your Wordpress/Blogger Blog, You wont lose the data at all but the domain and hence the Google Juice will be gone forever. So do read those gritty numerous lines before signing up for Blogging Services.
By now based on your needs, you will be able to decide which Blogging Platform to choose. But still in gist, I would recommend the following based on usage type:
For general users who just need to be free from technical jargon and code melodrama, Wordpress is the solution. For advanced users who need to get the most from the least, Blogger is the way out. Blogger provides ways to enhance your skills and prepare you so that later on you can buy your domain and have a good Hosting Service Provider to host your own site.
More about “How to Host your site” and wordpress.org later.
Feel free to ask any questions and give suggestions. I will be more than happy to attend to them.
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