Moving from WordPress to Blogger

I started CIO Dojo over on WordPress. I recently moved to Blogger. Why did I do that? Well, in part because Google (the provider of Blogger and Blogspot) plays better with Network Solutions Domain Name management. With WordPress, I had to point my domain to the NS1.WORDPRESS.COM nameserver and pay them a nominal fee for handling my domain needs.

I also moved because I have more going on in the Google world, and in fact they have a larger offering with Google Voice, Drive, Picasa, Apps, Gmail, etc.

Finally, I moved to be able to learn a new platform. I like to play with technology and learn new things.



So what have I learned? Which is "better"? As always, there are pluses and minuses to both.

WordPress Goodness:

• Extremely easy setup; pick a free template or purchase one. Learn to use the dashboard and customize. You can be blogging within an hour.
• Pretty powerful dashboard tools. I like that you have a library (images, documents, whatever) and that you can insert references to other posts or library images with the link button.
• Great community. WP has a lot of bloggers, and the "Freshly Pressed" exposes you to a lot of other blogs. It's easy to search out and then follow other blogs of interest. And if you follow people, they will often follow you in return.
• Easy scheduling of posts, and the scheduled post can automatically kick of a tweet, LinkedIn, Facebook, and probably some other social media posts.

WordPress Not So Goodness:

• The aforementioned expense and difficulty in pointing your domain name.
• A teacher of mine once called it WSYIAYG - What You See Is All You Get. So if you can use the dashboard to make a post look like you want, you're golden. But adjusting the underlying template is quite a bit more work.

Blogger Goodness:

• I found the template I am currently using on a site with hundreds of free templates. 
• And while I liked the out-of-the box Notch template quite a lot, there were a few things I wanted to tweak. Not only is that doable (open up the HTML/CSS of the template and edit away), but there is some decent documentation, some even including videos.
• There are many (thousands) of free widgets that you can add to your website. I'm still experimenting, and don't want to go overboard, but it's nice to know they're there.
• I haven't had enough time to see the difference, if any, in traffic, but having your site under the biggest search engine can't hurt. I still tweet posts, link them on Facebook and thumbs up them on StumbleUpon, and all of that helps get traffic.
• The web album image integration with Picasa takes a little getting used to, but is generally more powerful than the WP library

Blogger Not So Goodness:

• Maybe it's the template I'm using, but the drag and drop page layout tool is awful and incomprehensible. So if you don't know HTML and CSS and you want to change a lot on your site design, Blogger is probably not for you.
• The push to integrate this tightly with Google Plus is a little dubious, because I'm semi-doubtful on the future of Plus. In addition, unless I can find some code or widget to do that, there is no built-in option to automatically add new posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Once published, you have to go into the post yourself and click the share buttons.
• Image integration with Picasa is good, but there is no simple way to give your image a custom size, as there is with WP.

In general, I find the two platforms fairly similar and could recommend either. I think Blogger may be for the slightly more technically savvy.

I can also report that the move is pretty simple. Go to WordPress and backup/export your site. You end up with everything in an XML file. Go to WordPress2Blogger and use that free tool to convert to the format needed for a Blogger import. Do the import and you're 80% done. In my case I had to redo library images (but URL linked images were fine). See this site for good instructions.