One of my dear friend, philosopher and guide, whose opinion I value, recently suggested that I should move from Blogger to Wordpress(WP) for a better blogging experience. I had almost made up my mind to do so over the last weekend but then I read the above said quote somewhere, so decided to do the obvious, to compare the two options and then make a decision. The easiest way, as usual, Google :)
I found this very useful post which does a step by step comparison between WP and the Blogger: http://bit.ly/bnsYsG. But the good thing is the post is not judgmental. It lists the comparative features of both, tabular format, side by side, lists all the available widgets and in some cases the alternatives too but does not explicitly tell you which one is better but leaves the choice upto the reader.
Now there is no point in my repeating the whole process. However, just to let you know, I have decided to stick with Blogger for now. But for benefit of everybody I will list the so called drawbacks of using Blogger and the work-around that I am or will be using to deal with each of them:
Limited Templates
Around last month, Blogger launched "Template Designer" which should answer most of the concerns around limited templates and the lack of customization options. The "Template Designer" allows for a fair bit of tweaking to the templates….and they still adding features to it. So I believe in the days to come there would be a lot more customizations available. Checkout: http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/ for more details on this.
Embedded Comment Form
Blogger now provides one but it’s still very rudimentary with no comment threading options for follow-ups available yet. I haven't been able to get a workaround this. For now I am content with personally acknowledging the comments I get through email or other mediums.
Tracking and Stats
This is touted as a big attraction for WP users but as far as I understand users have only limited access to the stats and data unless they opt for a paid upgrade. If you are interested in stats and about how you good your blog is doing, I would suggest using Google Analytics tracking. It's free and the tracking can be easily installed using the 'HTML/JavaScript' widget available in Blogger. Once you register for a free GA account; just generate the tracking code, copy and paste in the 'HTML/JavaScript' widget and you are good to go. You will have access to user tacking and stats information as good as it can get for any website.
Widgets/Links to Social Widgets
Image storage
I know this is a bit of concern as WP offers 3 GB of space for image storage vs. 1 GB of Blogger. But the good news is that Blogger uses Picasa web albums of the associated Google account to store the images. Even in case you opt for an upgrade in Picasa you can use the storage for personal photos also and not just the ones related to the blog.
Final Verdict: I am not ruling out WP as a possibility in the future, but for now will stick to blogger :)
