Unbeknown to the faithful, LeftClick has been going through a crisis of direction in recent times as its resident chief cook and bottle washer shifted his online focus -- at least that's the intention/ still- in- motion thing: shift focus.As part of that upsurge, a shift from Blogger (our current platform) to Wordpress was being considered as WP has over the last couple of years really advanced its online offerings.
I've always been with Blogger and resisted the WP hype so I established a couple of Wordpress sites (eg)to explore how the inside/outside machinery was working. Basically there's very little difference between the machinery of the two platforms so I wanted to challenge my loyalty to Blogger to see if I was being sentimental and routine. (And we wouldn't want any of that now would we?)
Free is free
But here's the drum -- we're sticking with Blogger! The Blogger versus Wordpress playoff is a perennial online debate, so I'll tell you why I'm sticking with Blogger:
- Blogger is free. While they'll say that you can get free blogs on Wordpress, you get a limited choice of themes (they're called templates on Blogger) and very little, maybe zero, room to hack your theme on the free sites.If you want to access the great range of customized themes available (many of which are free and so many are excellent) you have to purchase a website to privately host them on. That's $5-10 per month.That's not free.
- Blogger is easy team up with Picasa.While the fact that Blogger is in house for such a massive imperialistic enterprise -- and that's a drawback sure -- is compensated by the fact that you have such easy posting access to Google's photosharing site, Picasa to house your images and graphics. This makes uploading images for displaying in your posts so darn easy. Other online image sharing sites such as Flickr are no where near as good because you very quickly run out of free space (you either have to pay for more space or complicate things by opening another account (I have 5 accounts on Flickr! So I know.) Flickr is not connected to your blog either so uploading an image requires you to visit elsewhere. I have been uploading images to Picasa for over 6 years (that's on several occasions maybe each week) and still have plenty of storage space to wallow in: (Picasa tells me "You are currently using 106 MB (10.37%) of your 1024 MB" -- and I have already 63 albums of images stored on the site!) I also can harness these images in an easy to create slide show making tool for post embedding which I prefer to the official one.
- The Blogger platform is improving. The irony is that despite Blogger's filial weight , it has ratcheted up its pursuit of Wordpress' properties especially over the last two years with a range of updates and new releases.So anything Wordpress offers in way of plugins and widgets, Blogger will more than likely try to replicate.But you have to wait and be patient. There was an upgrade only last week .
- The Blogger hack community rocks. I'm no shakes as a hacker but I appreciate the generosity and skill of the very broad Blogger hacking community who will generate tweaks to the template and offer them freely.This pursuit has become something of a hobby of mine such that despite my very shallow IT skills, I can work it so that I can utilise and adapt the hundreds of hacks being created within this ever expanding community. With WP you don't get nearly anything like that as the hacking window in WP requires you to remake the whole theme...then you need a paid for site, etc
- Blogger templates are getting much better. This is another hobbyist pursuit. When you sign up with Blogger you get offered a range of very dull template designs that are nonetheless quite serviceable. If you do a search you'll nonetheless find hundreds of freely available hacked templates that vary upon any number of layout themes.Some of these are adaptions of popular WP themes, but of late the creativity of template designers -- following on from recent Blogger platform upgrades -- has forged a new benchmark in Blogger template design. I may try out any number of templates on any site I administer before I start to deploy some of my own favorite hacks. However, I've learnt that it is best to know the internal workings of a limited number of template styles well rather than having to adapt to a range of separate customizations.So for now I stick with two web design studios: Quite Random (driven by the imaginative Ecuadoran, Fernando A. Coello) and a recent discovery, the Indonesian based, Blogspot tutorial.Of course template preference is always going to be eclectic and personal. So when I considered the prospect of dropping the Quite Random design I use here at LeftClick I couldn't find a reason to proceed as I love the way this site works -- such as the way when you open a post that's all you get with no side column or widgetry; and the way I can post without worrying to fiddle with the look of the post on the top page as the imagery and text snippet is automatic.I also use Quite Random designs on my other personal sites. They're all white too.
