Blogger vs. WordPress, and My Other Blogging Experiments

There are many blogging platforms out there. So far, I've only tried a couple. I started on LiveJournal around 2004. Loved it. The best part is their "friends" page. I can read entries from anyone on my friends list in chronological order. The closest I have ever come to this is a status update roll on MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter. The LiveJournal templates aren't too bad either. There are a few I like, and some minor tweaking is possible. (Unfortunately, LJ now has ads unless you pay.)

I tried out blogger because I friend of mine started one. It originally annoyed me because I couldn't add him to my LJ friends and get all my updates and once. Still, annoyance turned quickly into an opportunity to explore, and I quickly set up this account (with an initial misspelling of "Ecclectic"). I liked the interface. I liked the way I could customize everything. I don't have the greatest designs right now, but they are my designs. That's important to me.
I miss the old friend's page, though. Yeah, I can subscribe to other blogs or start a blogroll. The whole process is cumbersome though. Still, not a fan of the lack of that feature, and I can't forsee that ever changing.

Relatively recently, I checked out Tumblr. A lot of great stuff there. Oops! In fact, I have to take back something I said earlier. Tumblr seems to have integrated the LJ friends page. Good for them! They also have a great interface for publishing. Unfortunately, waaaaay too many things wrong. First, I don't know why but it doesn't look much like what I expect out of a blog. The templates are weak, so that doesn't help. Second, I get the impression that they are trying to do half blogging and half social networking (hence the "not looking like a blog" thing). It makes it hard for me to take entries seriously, and prevents it from being a platform for a serious blog for something like politics and/or religion. In the end, I'm torn about Tumblr. I like it...and I don't. I think they are going in the right direction though, and they may be the next evolutionary step in the right direction. For now, though, it's a step back.

I've recently opened a WordPress account. WordPress has a lot going for it. The best thing going for them is their across the top tabs. I can have a home page, about me page, blog article page, podcast page, and any other page I want. I love that. The biggest issue is the inability to customize design. if you want your blog to look like something other than their horrible templates, you need to pay $15 per year. Comparatively speaking, that's a lot. If you were to pay an additional $15, you could get your WordPress its own domain. Add the two and you have paid as much as you would for a GoDaddy site with tons more storage. The pricing is not only ridiculous, but the inability to make your blog look good without paying is a deal-killer for me.

So far, after I've min/maxed my options, I think my favorite is still blogger. It simply has more of the features I like, and less that I don't. I mainly miss my friends page from LJ, but they have something similar in the dashboard that also allows me to add other blogs not on blogger (which LJ doesn't), so it's a bit of an upgrade. And I really wish I could do tabs like WordPress (I can't emphasize how much I want this). Regardless, the best part is I can make it my own visually and don't have to worry about ads (unless I put them there myself, like my EVE ad, which I mainly have there because I like the pic).