- The "Categories" option was always one of the things I envied non-Blogger blogging programs like WordPress. Blogger has added tags since I was a newbie blogger, but it is still really nice to set up some general categories to sort your posts (rather than having to remember to stick to consistent nomenclature yourself). Since blogs publish in reverse chronological order, indexing blog posts has always been an issue.
- WordPress has more and cooler (ok, maybe "more literary-looking" is a better phrase) templates.
- WordPress also gives you a different window when you want to preview a post before publishing. Since it is really easy to lose a post unintentionally in Blogger when toggling between preview and editing views in the same window, WordPress' solution is a very nice touch.
- When I added a photo to a post from my hard drive, I was impressed with the extra layout options (not available in Blogger, other than simple alignment of the image). However, once I had uploaded the photo and wanted to add text to the post, I couldn't; when I clicked around in the posting window, nothing took. I had to switch to HTML view (rather than "Visual" view) to create a post. But when I went back and edited the post, I was able to insert the extra text fine. This may be my problem rather than WordPress' problem.
Hmm. As I'm typing this, I see that Blogger's spellcheck flags the couldn part of couldn't as a typo.
- Back to the bulleted list. Another nice feature from WordPress is a button to insert a "more" line and break up a post. This way you can easily put in just the beginning of your post, then have your reader follow along "below the jump." This is a good way of displaying more posts on your main blog page (or keeping dicey content a little more hidden, or just building suspense). On the other hand, it demands an extra click from your reader (bloggers argue about this post structure a lot).
- I tried inserting photos from my Flickr account, but that started getting too complicated, so I gave up. Flickr photos usually work better if you're in Flickr and use the "Blog This" button anyway.
All in all, WordPress has lots of nice extra options to play with (possibly too many). The next time I feel impelled to start a new blog, I might give it a whirl.
Oh, yeah, and the WordPress testy blog is here.
3 comments:
Good comparison list! I'm still looking into a good blog to use for my own personal(non-class use) Your comparison was very informative.
You really gave a very thoughtful and informative comparison. Blogger is the only blogging tool I've used (rather sparingly) before (maybe for a year or so) and I never knew or thought about the lack of categories until this week. As you pointed out, being able to categorize your posts is a very useful feature. (I'm sure the Blogger people realize this by now and wonder if they will include it eventually?)
I never saw (at least knowingly) a wordpress blog before checking out your sample and I do agree with you: it is very professional and clean looking. (I also love how "Mr. WordPress" himself commented on your first post! Was that WordPress or you kidding around?)
It's interesting to read the different problems you encountered when uploading photos. I guess it really goes to show that there are pros and cons of every platform.
Thanks, guys. :) JG - Mr. Wordpress himself really did comment on my first post. A nice little touch to the platform as well.
Tagging arguably gives finer functionality than categories, since you can apply a variety of specific labels to a post. But general categories may be all you want. That's the thing when the user organizes his or her own content: some will want to use LC subject headings and some will just want to leave it all uncategorized.
I did another test post on WordPress by posting a photo directly from my Flickr stream. As I suspected, it worked better.
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