Blogger and Wordpress Early Comparison

My three blog's right now are on blogger. I don't have a lot of complaints. It works, and the interface is clean and intuitive. There are bugs though. The compose tool does weird unexpected things with formatting, so I only use the pure html box. And Safari on my powerbook seems to hate blogger, so I have to use Firefox.

I've been toying with wordpress.com as well. I haven't put any blogs up yet, but it looks easy to use. It has a slightly steeper learning curve than Blogger, but Wordpress looks easier to customize. But on the other hand, you can do more advanced customization with Blogger. And it is more speedy.

Here's a dated but detailed comparison http://jayajha.wordpress.com/2005/09/27/bloggercom-vs-wordpresscom/

I'll update soon with more impressions.

wordpress bug, multiple/duplicate blog on dashboard

So I registered a new blog at wordpress.com today. In case you don't know, they're one of the bigger competitors to Google's blogger. Well, there was a bug, the blog showed up twice on my dashboard (list of blogs). I tried a couple of things to get rid of the multiple listing: transferring ownership, removing the blog, etc.; but nothing really worked. It looks like I'll have to contact their support about this one. They have an interesting support model. They have a support link on their website that only gives you contact info if it is in during business hours. It's an interesting way of offering support.

Having worked on hobby swap I know how tricky it can be to come up with a customer service solution that works. It's an interesting way of taking control of how much time you spend with customer service.

I guess I'll just have to wait until Monday morning to see if the folks over at Wordpress.com can fix my account.

Using WordPress.org CMS

I have been playing with lots of different CMS's (Content Management Systems) and blogging software. There are an overwhelming number out there.

If you are new to blogging and using CMS, like I was two days ago, it can be totally overwhelming. That's okay. I've been there. It's like being a kid in a candy store. There are tons of cool things, but it's hard to pick one thing that is exactly what you want.

I've actually been playing around a lot with wordpress lately. They give out free blogs on their wordpress.com site, and also they have a piece of software you can run on your web server on their wordpress.org site.

Wordpress software is really easy to install on your personal website. All you have to do is download their software, put it where you want your site to be, change some read/write/execute permissions, and voila you are done. And there are tons of cool plugins that are very useful. One called E-Commerce makes it exceedingly easy to sell things on your site. It's amazing how easy it is (with some tech savvy and know-how) to quickly setup an online store.

Overall, wordpress is very cool and easy to use. I like blogger, but I'm definitely going to give wordpress a trial to see if I don't want to use it for some new websites I am working on.