I got really hacked off with Blogger yesterday. A guy I know from his WordPress.com blog tried to comment on one of my posts, but couldn’t. I thought I’d sorted it by not forcing him to have a Blogger (Google) account, but no. So I had to go trawling for why Blogger did not allow i* users to comment, because of its use of cookies. Sure enough, this guy uses an iPhone and Safari.
It’s possible that he could change his browser settings to accept these cookies, but why should he have to? Instead, I changed my blog – dumbed it down, basically – so as to allow him to leave a comment.
But I was really turned off by the Blogger experience – I think if you’re going to have a blog, one of the top priorities is to allow other people to interact with your posts. So, overnight, I decided to give wordpress.com another go.
If I were going to change at all, going through WordPress.com was a no-brainer, because the three or four blogs that I follow are all on wordpress.com, so there won’t be any issues logging in, to comment of each other’s posts. I’m still not convinced by WordPress itself, but…..for better or for worse. In fact the only thing I found so far that it couldn’t do is to embed videos. But, I only had three anyway, so I uploaded them to YouTube instead, and linked to them in my posts instead. And because of my tendency to mis-type, I’d very much like a spellchecker, but for that, apparently, I need a plug-in, and a more expensive subscription. It feels weird to pay all this money, and to get messages telling me I still haven’t paid enough. Anyway there is a workaround on an add-on to the browser instead, which should help with all web forms not just the “create post” form on wordpress.com.
So, that was after breakfast, and it has taken the afternoon to go through the links on the site. Even now, I’m not finished but the main pages are done. In truth, because I’ve now tinkered with wordpress.com, it was a darned site quicker this time around. I’m probably ready to publish the site and just rely on people to report broken links. Actually, knocking up the site was easier than the first time because I knew how to do things.
When I posted from here last time, I never got so far as assigning tags to posts. My categories in Blogger imported as tags, so I’ll stick with that – there’s almost 400 posts on here. So….next challenge!
Mister Bump 
So are you going to stick with WordPress or go back and forth? By the way, my potentially misspelled words show up with a squiggly red line under them…at least in the WordPress app and the Safari browser on my iPhone, so I don’t really miss not having a built-in spell checker in WordPress.
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The main thing last time was worrying about whether e.g. my existing email would still work, seemed like wp just wanted to take ownership. But all that is OK. I’m not comfortable that wp.com just seem to want more and more money out of me. Even on the lowest plan, this site is my most expensive. But if people can’t interact with my Blogger site, I probably needed to change to a platform where they can.
I think I’m over any showstoppers now so I’m probably going to stay – so I’ll be here for a year at any rate. And the page doesn’t look so bad, does it? though I wish I had a bit more control over the fonts/sizes. Especially that enormous “post” button.
Next thing, I’ll have to work out how these pingbacks work.
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I tried blogger, many years ago. It seemed ok, but I was also on Microsoft’s ‘Spaces’ at the time too; and when MS shut that down and moved to WordPress I moved with them, and haven’t looked back since. I don’t have an issue with WordPress’s pricing structure: if you’re happy to put up with a *.wordpress.com address you can even get by without paying a bean (though you have to subject your visitors to adverts to do that). I see that’s not an option for you as you use a custom domain.
Pingbacks are simple: you just have to remember to link to a specific article on a blog, not to the main blog address.
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I had no idea of the history with Microsoft, and never got involved with Spaces. I think my first knowledge of Blogger must have been because I used to read a blog on Blogspot, which presumably got swallowed by Google, so when I started a blog myself it was the natural choice. I still don’t like the WordPress pricing structure, that they knobble the WordPress open source application, and only open bits up to people as they pay more and more. Plus, I run about five sites and this one is far and away the most expensive. Even now, when they must’ve reduced their prices from £48 to £36 pa. I think the free plan also constrains the site design. Even now, some features are unavailable to me unless I subscribe even more. I’d quite like a spellchecker on the editor, say, because I am prone to typos. But wp will not permit me to use plug-ins.
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