Blogspot.com vs Wordpress.com - the battle for freedom (Part 1)

Lately I’ve been asked by several people whether I prefer wordpress.com (waxjelly.com’s choice of blog hosting) or blogspot.com (which I use for buzzgorilla.com). Now to make this post “fair”, I should say that #1 I don’t have a predesired outcome (if I did, I wouldn’t be straddling the fence with my blogs, now would I?), and #2 since these are both free hosted blogs, and the two biggest players in the game, I think it’s completely fair to require enormous amounts of functionality and free crap from them.

Great. Let’s get started.

1. We’ll begin with the setup process. Both sites are fairly easy to setup and activate, though wordpress feels a little more secure with their multiple automated emails in the activation process. Their login screen is also beautiful, but the dashboard throws you automatically to a page that doesn’t seem very useful until you’ve really gotten into your blog routine.Blogspot however, is a more user-friendly interface for the “about me section”, and now with myspace being so prevelant makes me think that google may be going social networking sooner than anticipated, which seems cool. The dashboard itself at blogspot is a bit disjointed, however, as they only process that you’re logged in and looking at your own blog if you click on either an “edit this post” link or your own personal image. Which, in the case of buzzgorilla, I’ve removed from the interface, so it creates unnecessary clicks to get into the dashboard area. But that’s for later discussion.For now, score 1 for Blogspot as their activation interface feels quicker, more personalized, and hassle free.
2. Editing the template. Hands down, this goes to blogspot. One of the most frustrating things about wordpress is that they not only have a much more complex template system than is necessary (I’ve done at least a dozen wordpress themes for remote hosting sites, and it’s always a major ordeal), but they make you PAY to use that feature on the “free” hosting service! Their “Upgrades” tab is a great idea, but the fact that the only Upgrade listed is “Custom CSS”, no plugins (waxjelly could use a flash plugin asap), no cool multi-user permission upgrades, nothing. $15 is a little steep to be able to do something I’d expect to do anyway. Especially considering that I can’t import outside templates, even from an extensive official wordpress gallery.Blogspot’s template management is very simple and clean, with the only exception being that they still use a “publish” paradigm, which means you have to wait for a while (if you have multiple posts) for the template to repopulate across all the pages on your site. This isn’t enough to make ‘em lose, and it’s also something they’ve already announced they’ll be correcting in the new beta.blogger (info available at the blogger buzz site).Score 1 more for blogspot.
   
3. Post Writing. I gotta say, they’re both not great. TinyMCE is not that freakin hard to install and it works fine. Wordpress saves my post as I’m writing. That’s a great feature. AJAX allows for some amazing stuff. But does it really have to jack with my cursor every time it saves? This bug has supposedly been fixed, and I gotta say, it’s better, but still glitchy.Blogspot is not much better, as it doesn’t read it’s own HTML intuitively, so you end up losing formatting as you switch between the two. For that reason alone, I’m gonna give this feature to Wordpress, but I’ll list a few more reasons just for good measure.
   1. Image upload. This is a big deal, and should probably be a whole feature set by itself, but that wouldn’t be fair, because blogspot doesn’t even really offer this. They let you upload photos, yeah. But where the hell do they go?In the wordpress editor, you upload a photo, then you have several options for how to include it into the post, and you get a nice little gallery under the editor (see the screen shots) to handle all the photos you’ve uploaded.
   2. Video. This is nice. Wordpress has a nice little tutorial (in classic web 2.0 form) for how to utylize sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Grouper for your video needs. This can’t be a seperate setting, ’cause they both support it, but it’s a little easier to use in wordpress, since blogger removes < object > tags in their rich editor.Score 1 for wordpress.
4. Finally, we’ll discuss feature management. This is a multi-point category for me, because each issue is important in their own right for buzzgorilla.com and waxjelly.com respectively.
   1. Search. Now, it bears noting that Google OWNS blogspot (aka blogger). This bears noting because the search feature is FAR better in wordpress(!!) than it is in blogspot. This is simply because (aghem…) Blogspot doesn’t offer one with their blog. (”WTF?” I hear you ask.) “Xakly”. I say. “WTF indeed.” Not much more to say on this. You can sign up for an adsense account and get adsense for search code and embed that way, but it’s buggy and unintuitive at best. Wordpress’s search is considered a standard “Sidebar Widget” which is controlled in the “Presentation” section, and very nicely sorts and displays results pages just like any other page on the site.Score 1 for Wordpress.
   2. Adsense. This is not as surprising as search. Wordpress doesn’t support Adsense. So, if you want to make money on your blog (which, why wouldn’t you?), but you don’t want to have to host it yourself (which, …?), then blogspot may be your only option.Score 1 for blogspot.
   3. Archives. This may not seem like a big deal for most people, but the way in which the blog handles archived data (especially if there isn’t a search feature) is a very big deal. I won’t go too deep into this for now (you’ll understand why in the next 2), but suffice it to say…Score 1 for Wordpress.
   4. Categories. Not really sure how blog spot made it this long without them, but …Score 1 for Wordpress.
   5. Pages. This may very well be the straw that breaks the camels’ back for me, but blogspot also doesn’t offer pages. so…Score 1 for Wordpress.

That’s my vote. The final score puts us at:

Worpress 5 | Blogspot 3

However, if you actually read the post, you’ll see that this doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. Blogspot’s new beta is promising categories, better group-blog management, and more. Wordpress is promising to “Add Sense” (get it?) back into their functionality soon. But for now, here’s my take in a nutshell.

If you want to make money on your site, you have 2 options:

1. Use blogspot.com in all it’s free glory and glitchy crap and include an adsense tag or two.
2. Download the open source version of wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server somewhere. Find a template you like and/or hire someone to edit it (’cause it’s not easy if you don’t know CSS fairly well). And then include the adsense stuff.

If you just want to blog and use that as your own site (for personal or professional use) and don’t really care about ad income (which makes sense if you expect limited traffic), then … go to wordpress.com and sign up.

ONE LAST THING: If anyone with any pull at either wordpress or blogspot ever reads this, PLEASE, please, Pah-Lease… give us an option of using a full screen editor! I’m so tired of only seeing 12 lines of text at a time! Just an option, that’s all I ask. Thanks.

Your friend and mine,

Meshach.