Why WordPress blogs – an afterthought

I am a Google fan, and I love GReader, GMaps, GMail, Gdocs, mobile Gmail. I dont remember the last time I was not using Google for search ; in fact that is the only toolbar I have in my browser  🙂 . That also let me going with Blogger for more than 3 years. Recently I have left blogger with a PR 3. Crazy that I deleted all the blogger posts after the import.

Then I read some posts that Cutline ( the theme I am using ) has been sold, theres no tool for importing WP posts in blogger ( Draft blogger has one, but one needs to specify a XML file ) ; looks like there should be RAID 0 for blogs too 🙂 These are all shivering; aren’t they.

Then I found out why people have moved to Blogger from WordPress. I have discussed some of them in my earlier post ; so thought I would post the one that really brought me to WordPress – SEO friendliness.

What most people miss out when comparing blogging platforms is the way search engine looks at the blogs. Now I am not a great web site analyst ; but after 3+ years into blogging I have learnt a fraction of it. Once I had typed a misspelt my post heading, and there was no way to change the post title URL in blogger. I had to make a repost of the entire post for the spelling change in the URL. In wordpress you just need to edit the permalink; and you are all done. There are more, incoming links , trackbacks, outgoing links, and many others add up to the PR. Blogger has backlinks but I never saw anything coming up within 3+ years, with WordPress less than 15 datys old for me there are some incoming links – now aint that awesome. There are third party tools available which does the needful , with WP its out of the box.

There are more in blogs other than posts.

Moving from blogger to wordpress

I have recently moved from my previous blog to this wordpress blog. I have not imported from my earlier blog, as I want it to stay as it is. It was my first blog, it helped me in letting me know that a blog is not about writing posts, lots of things go behind making a good blog.  For someone like me, who never worked on html / javascript I learned a fraction of that too. 🙂 .. remember the post-footer and div things.

It is an excellent platform, endless ways for extensibility, and supported by most of the blog world. But there are some things missing which a professional blogger would look for. I guess WordPress peeps the post there.

Should I stay or should I go – WordPress vs Blogger

Could not think of a better post name – the post name is one of the greatest hits of The Clash.

I have started blogging on my blogger blog for quite some time . Blogger has given me the liberty to add various scripts and widgets to my blog – thus letting me change my blog theme now and then and adding widgets for the better. My blog currently has a PR of 3 and I think blogger has still lots to offer.

A couple of days back I also enabled podcast for my blog, well things are fine with blogger. But for a couple of days I am getting the feeling that starting of a wordpress blog would be better. In fact I started this blog around two years back , but what kept me away from continuing at WordPress was the fact that I could not edit scripts, neither could I customize it. So I was there posting here with some general stuff, and giving my favourite blog much attention. So as a beginner to blogs, Blogger was amazing…. well it still is. Well so far so good; an amazing experience, fun, lots of widgets – cool stuff ; overall an excellent platform for bloggers to start on.

One of the things which was holding me blogging at WordPress is the lack of professional themes. Well a couple of days back I found this theme – it was professional, elegant and had the best look from all of the featured themes. I am also starting to realize the basics for a professional blog – comments,feeds, useful widgets – and WordPress offers all of those – adding a few more widgets like online presence,music player would be nice – takes the boring times away.

I guess WordPress has everything, and with the acquistion of Intense Debate, comments are likely to get more interesting. I also have Intense Debate in my blog; but I guess with WordPress 2.7 rollout, things shall become better.

Just feeling nostalgic, should I stay at Blogger, or should I go to WordPress – even though somewhere WordPress is peeping the post.