Clear Blue Dei

As you may have read in my post BlogBackupOnline: Great Idea but not reliable, I did some testing and had some big concerns about this product and the rave reviews it was getting from others.

After corresponding with Aaron from Techrigy and getting good and thorough answers from him, I feel a lot better about BlogBackupOnline. At the end of this post you will find the answers I received from Aaron regarding each item I noted in my previous post.

It is currently beta and acts like a beta release, in other words, it is quirky and has some bugs. But it is definitely far enough along to see that it is going to be very nice and that they are putting a lot of thought and effort into making it a good and stable product.

I got a little worked up mainly because it seemed that people and tech reviews were treating it like a finished product and when I tested it, it clearly was still in beta testing and was not as good (at this point) as they were leading people to believe.

But I am going to recommend that you take a look at it and see what it has and will do. It has some amazing features and is a very ambitious project, especially for being offered for free. Remember that it is still beta, but go get a feel for it and remember it because I think it will set the standard in blog backup sites before very long. I certainly look forward to when it out of beta and will definitely review it again then.

And Aaron very thoroughly addressed everything I had written in my email to Techrigy. I had said that I felt I received a ‘form letter’ reply, but after the weekend, Aaron wrote me a very good email addressing everything I’d found. So I will leave you with a copy of what he wrote so you can read the answers for yourself.

~Susan Mellott

Email Response from Aaron of Techrigy:

I’ve just done some regression tests and put out a patch. I’ll try to address everything you’ve brought up. The patch fixed a few problems:

1 The restoration process was incorrectly counting how many posts it had restored (effectively doubling it) which is why it was only restoring about 27 posts. It’s been fixed so it should properly restore 50 posts now.

2 When the restoration job stops after 50 posts, it was not properly writing a message into the log. I added a warning to the job log when someone attempts to restore more than 50 posts to blogger - “You attempting to restore more than 50 posts to Blogger. Only the first 50 posts will be restored. Successfully restored 50 blog posts.”

3 I added an informational message to the Restoration Wizard: “IMPORTANT NOTE ON RESTORING TO BLOGGER!!! In order to reduce splogs, Blogger will only allow 50 posts per day to be restored. If you are attempting to restore more than 50 posts to Blogger, you will have to use this Restore wizard to restore 50 posts per day until all post have been transfered.”

4 One the Content tab, I moved the pagination to the top of the grid. A handful of people have told me they can not get to the pagination control at the bottom of the screen - I’ve tried every combination of browsers (IE6,IE7, FireFox, Safari, Opera) and operating systems and haven’t been able to recreate it, so I haven’t been able to fix it. Hopefully moving pagination to the grid header will alleviate the problem. Any insight into the browser or configuration you are using that might be causing the problem?

NOTE by me: no idea why the bottom pagination was problematic, but it works just fine now at the top of the list.

5 Removed references to “changed blog posts”. When we read an entry, the white space often changes. For instance, if we read it through the feed versus when we screen scrape, we get some small changes to the content in the white space. We maintain a full history of changes so all versions are maintained so that not copies are ever lost, but these white space issues can confuse people, so I’ve simply taken the reference to them in the job messages out.

Bugs that still need to be addressed:

1 In reference to duplicate entries backup up with http://alongthepathto20.blogspot.com/. If you are using Feedburner combined with Blogger, the backup we collect has duplicate entries. Recently after acquiring Feedburner, Blogger started integrating Feedburner which has caused these hiccups. This problem occurs because we read an entry by screen scraping and get one permalink to the entry, then when we read the feed through feedburner, it’s has a different permalink (your feedburner entries go back through August 3rd which is why the duplicates go back to that date and stop). I’m working on a fix, but it’s not straight forward. To avoid the problem, you can disable the feedburner temporarily, but that not adequate -we’ll have to build a solution as time permits. For now you have duplicate entries - better to have 2 copies than to potential miss some content.

2 Restoring in chronoligical order. Right now it pulls the posts and just restore them in the order they are in the database which is arbitrary. If it restores everything, no problem - they are restored in arbitrary order but doesn’t really matter since they are assigned the appropriate post dates. If you select the entries to restore, no problem - again restored in arbitrary order but it gets to all of them. But when it gets to 50 and stops, its just taken the first 50 it pulled out of the database. Harmless but confusing.

I’ll try to answer your questions as well:

1 it shows how many posts and comments but not how many pictures (and actually, somewhere along the line, it quit reporting comments).

ANSWER - I’ve put this as a feature request to show how many pictures it’s backed up. If it doesn’t report comments or blogs found, that should mean it found zero. I’ll put a feature request as well to change this, since I can see how it would be confusing.

2 It says it is free for now while in beta, but approx how much will it cost in the future? I could not find a price on any ofthe products you offer, they all said to contact sales which makes me think it must be expensive

ANSWER - We are hoping to offer BlogBackupOnline for free as long as possible. I don’t foresee charging for it anytime soon. It is actually quite expensive to maintain for us, $698 per month hosting cost because it requires raid drives, tape backups, redundant network connections, class A hosting space, etc… in order to ensure the content is truly protected. If we did need to charge, we would likely charge $5-$10 per month. We also develop business products that have nothing to do with BlogBackupOnline. If those are successful, BlogBackupOnline should remain free indefinitely. Of course, many of the features you are request are slow to be implemented because we don’t charge for it which is a good point for offering a paid version.

3 it would be nice to be able to restore from and to a certain date, especially with the 50 post limitation in Blogger (and possibly in other blog engines)

ANSWER - great feature request. I’ll see if I can implement something like that.

4 it didn’t restore my tags/labels and I wonder if it would have if I was going blogger to blogger or any of the same type. (the answer was no after I tried it)

ANSWER - right now it doesn’t restore tags/labels (even from blogger to blogger). That’s been on the feature enhancement list for a while, so I hope to get to that soon.

5 my social networking and bookmarks icons on bottom of each post copied over and works, but points to my original blog. I can understand why, but it does still create a problem.

ANSWER - yes, I agree this is not ideal. I’ll look at various enhancements to replace links to the old website with links to the new website. Probable won’t happen quickly given the complexity.

6 when I click on content for my blog, I only see the last 10 posts and there is no way to scroll down through my earlier posts.

ANSWER - Your not the first person to encounter this problem. I made an adjustment to the pagination control. I hope that helps.

7 it is confusing on the restore screen when it shows nothing in the box on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen. It seems like there is nothing to restore. I figured out that I needed to ‘load blog entries’ but it would be much less confusing if they loaded when I entered that screen.

ANSWER - Yes, I can understand the confusion. If you have a page with many entries, loading when the page opens can be a major head ache, which is why it doesn’t load upon opening the screen. I’ll take another look and determine a better/clearer way to handle.

8 on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen, it would be useful if there is a limit on a blog engine as to how many posts can be restored each day, to state that on the page and to give an error if more than that number of posts were selected.

ANSWER - Great suggestions. I’ll put this on the short list - shouldn’t be to complicated to add but I couldn’t get to this weekend.

9 the restore screen says NOTE: The major blog platforms do not support restoring comments. The comments we have backed up will be added to the end of the post’s text. But WordPress imports posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file and posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog and posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog

ANSWER - Yes, Wordpress can import those. We are limited to using the APIs like Metaweblogs which doesn’t expose these capabilities. I’ll look at other features time permitting, but I’m afraid without major rework its still quite difficult. Perhaps WordPress 2.3 (just released) has some capabilities built into the API these days.

10 the export tab lets me export my backup to a file on my hard drive. But what can I do with this file when I have it if I want to restore from it? will Wordpress import it?

ANSWER - The export file is not designed to be imported into WordPress directly. Its XML, so anyone could write an XSLT to convert it into whatever format they needed. For now, its simply a backup copy for your own piece of mind. Worst case scenario you will always have the content that can be imported if need be. We are working on an import.

11 and if so, why not the comments as comments?

ANSWER - good suggestion. We should write comments as their own nodes. But we just havent gotten around to it yet.

12 Since there is no name/password required to backup a blog, I believe you could essentially backup almost anyone’s blog (or certain posts) and restore them to your own blog. (I think you could do this with other backup tools also since they use the public RSS feeds)

ANSWER - Yes, absolutely. BlogBackupOnline is like a copier machine. I could take a Picasso down to Kinko’s and copy it and put it on my wall at home -but it doesn’t make it a Picasso We discourage this and respond promptly to any DCMA notices - but technically we can’t prevent it. It hasn’t been a problem so far and we hope it won’t.

I hope this helps. Since you’ve beat me up pretty good in public, I’ll take it you don’t like the product even as a free public service. That’s your right. But honestly, BlogBackupOnline is by far the most full feature, documented blog backup system out there. It require no software and even gives you the storage for free, and works with more platforms than any other solutions. It backs up the blog posts, the comment, and the images linked to from you blog. It’s automated to run daily backups - you set it up and forget it until you need it. All for free.

Yes, you encountered some bugs with restoring which is my fault - Iapologize and hope we corrected it. And I realize some of the content you backed up was very confusing because it got duplicate entries. I’ll keep trying to make it more logical and polished. But I’ll stressed, every blog you enter was (and continues to be with no effort by you) 100% backed up. All your content is safe from loss at this point. Restoration is not perfect, but it works the best it can given the limitations of Blogger. Again it was very confusing in your situation, and I’m sorry for that again.

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This is the final post in this series. In Part One I created blogs in each of the various blog engines. Part Two then reviewed the 3 major blog engines, Google Blogger, Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.

I’ve decided to make my primary blog my own hosted Wordpress from WordPress.org on my own domain Clear.Bluedei.com. You will notice however, that it is not as full-featured yet and my WordPress.com blog Allthingsweb20.wordpress.com or my Google Blogger blog, alongthepathto20.blogspot.com. That is because when you host your own WordPress blog, you have to set up everything yourself, it comes very vanilla. This allows you add all kinds of plugins and really customize it, but it takes time and is not as quick to get up and running with all the bells and whistles. Blogger really shines at being quick to get up and running with lots of add-ons that are easy to setup. Even WordPress.com, while limited in what it can do compared to the others, will let you create a very nice and full-featured blog quickly. But for me, the ability to host and completely control my own blog and to customize it however I want, makes it worth the extra time it takes to get it looking as good and as full-featured as the others.

(NOTE: We went with Inmotion Hosting for our web host and you can read my post about choosing this host service here. In retrospect, I would have chosen Blue Host instead. I did not find them until too late. I may still switch although it will cost me and will be a hassle to lose everything. But twice so far I have lost some or all of a post I was was trying to create because I could not temporarily connect to my site (or to inmotionhosting.com either). Just now this happened again. It doesn’t go down for long, say 5-10 minutes. But I also haven’t done a blog post for at least a week and it happened just as I was trying to write this post so I really don’t know the extent of the problem. But I have concerns with its reliability when I am trying to write a post and I work hard enough to write my posts, I don’t need to be afraid of losing them and/or having to wait and worry about it until my site comes back.)

In this post, I will review the other, less well-known blog engines. While I recommend using either Google Blogger or WordPress, I think it is useful to have an idea about each of these others. You can see an example of each in Part One of this series.

One of the other players in the blog engine wars is Six Apart. They have a number of different blog engines available: Vox, LiveJournal, TypePad and MovableType. These are listed in order from their lowest to highest end blogs. I looked only at the 2 free blogs which were Vox and LiveJournal.

Both TypePad and MovableType have monthly charges and although they say they have a 14 day free trial you have to actually choose a plan as if you were signing up for it and give your credit card information and then cancel it within the 14 days. I wasn’t about to do that so I will just give you an idea of what they have and you can go to the sixapart site if you want to know more. Personally, I would never pay the prices they are asking for a blog engine with so many good, free ones available. As an example, Typepad, which they call The choice for professional bloggers, costs anywhere between $.95 and $89.95 per month (4.95, 8.95, 14.95, 29.95, 89.95 / mo with 15% off annual subscription). The lowest cost blog has no domain mapping, full html , custom css. This is less than you would get with Google Blogger for free. I did not even look at MovableType which they call the The best choice for business blogging.

So that left me with Vox (Personal blogging taken to the next level) and LiveJournal (A diverse community of independent bloggers). Here are my impressions of these. Again, you can see my working blogs by following the links in my Part One post.

Vox:

• can import posts from other blogs (but only 1 month it appears)
• looks childish
• has neighborhoods and groups
• can easily add video and book lists
• can add widgets
• can add friends
• Seems more like a mix of MySpace and a blog

LiveJournal:

• has ads for plus free version
• can add friends
• no import of posts?
• wants to use photobucket for pics
• slow processing
• can set ‘mood’ of post
• very MySpace-ish
• WAY too many advertisements and you can’t control them

My view of SixApart blog engines are that they are just trying to make money from them and I would not be interested in their blogs, although I do know a few people who use LiveJournal and TypePad.

InstantSpot is a blog engine that almost didn’t make it into my testing because I had not heard of it and only found out about it right at the end. But I was impressed enough by it that I wanted to include it. Here is my instant spot blog. I didn’t do much to it but from looking around at other instant spot blogs, they look to be highly customizable, almost to the point of looking like a CMS (content management system). And it clearly seems to be geared toward tracking, marketing and promoting your site.

Instant Spot:

• can edit .css
• allows google adsense (just click in ad manager)
• tracking script manager works with trackers like g analy, feedburner, etc
• host header mgmt allows redirecting to a host domain name
• definitely looks geared towards tracking, marketing and promoting
• has large set of social networking icons (like digg, etc) at bottom of each post (many of which I have never heard)
• tag line is “Get spotted now!
• seems to be highly customizable judging by looking at other instant spot blogs. Not sure how though.
• has ads on page

Instant Spot was the only other blog engine that looked intriguing to me. I could see it being useful for people who are selling or promoting something and who want a very nice looking site (not sure of the effort involved though) and who want to be able to market, track and promote their site. If you had a club or small business, this seems like a good site. We teach Aikido and I could see easily setting up a website for our Aikido club on this. Here is an instant spot site that is for a fitness class that is not fancy and was probably easy to set up, but is a decent site for their classes. (I don’t know or endorse these people, just thought it was a good example of a not-too-fancy, easy to set up, useful site). And here is a really nice looking blog. Instant Spot seems to have some definite possibilities.

Well, that is it for my review of blog engines. Google Blogger for balance between being easy and having functionality, WordPress.org (self-hosted wordpress) for total control and flexibility and Instant Spot for an easy (I think) website for a club, class, non-profit or small business.

~Susan Mellott

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So as you know from my first post on this “Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars Part 1: The Test“, I am reviewing and evaluating several different blog engines, with an emphasis on Google Blogger and WordPress (.com and .org). You can see my previous post to see the different blogs in action. And I’m sure this is going to be a large post, just reviewing the Blogger and WordPress blogs, so I will have a “Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars: The Other Options” post following this one where I’ll talk about the other blogs I looked at. But for all intents and purposes, it came down to Blogger and WordPress (2 ways).

I wanted to decide which type of blog would work best for my needs and which one I would recommend to others. It turned out to not be quite that simple. Each of the 3 main blog engines (Blogger, wordpress.com hosted Wordpress and self-hosted Wordpress) had some serious advantages and some serious drawbacks. So as it turns out, rather than recommending one above all others, I will give an overview of each, what is good and bad about them and why and for whom I would recommend each particular one.

And to make a long story short, I recommend Blogger for people who want someone else to host their blog, don’t want to pay for a web hosting service and/or who want a quick and easy blog that takes hardly any maintenance or technical know-how.

For people who want the all-around best solution, who have their own web host and like to get ‘techie’ (and know how to do installs, use unix and ftp, etc), it’s definitely WordPress from wordpress.org. This is the most flexible, you have the most control over it and your data and it will do almost anything you want if you find the right plug-ins or code. But you have to have the know-how and desire to use it and it is only as good as you make it. And you have to have somewhere to install it like a web hosting service.

Google Blogger: I personally give Google Blogger the edge over WordPress.com hosted WordPress for anyone who doesn’t have their own web host and/or wants an easy and quick blog. I think it is good for:

1. Anyone who doesn’t have a lot of programming, moving files, installs, bits and bolts of how things work experience
2. Anyone who wants an easy setup with the most features for a blog hosted by the blog provider and the most options for adding plugins and html code easily.
3. Anyone who wants to have their own domain name, but use a blog hosted by the blog provider. In other words, who wants to buy a domain name like say, www.allaboutme.com (costs about $10/yr) but doesn’t want to have their own web hosting service where they can put and maintain their own data and blogs (costs about $10/month). Redirecting is free in Blogger, it costs $10? (10 credits) in Wordpress.com
4. You might want to have commercial usage on your blog. WordPress.com’s term of service prohibits ‘commercial usage’ (although its unclear to mean exactly what they mean). It appears OK on a Google Blog (see this post from the Blogger Help group).

Google Blogger has the most features, the most choices and the ability to add html code easily including that using javascript. That means that when you find something you like (like say Odiogo, which is the text-to-speech widget you see at the top of my posts on my google and personally hosted wordpress blog), you can add it to your blog posts very easily. You cannot add Odiogo to a Wordpress.com hosted blog because it doesn’t allow javascript. I’ve run into several widgets that I wanted to add to my blogs, but could not easily do it in Wordpress.com. You can easily redirect it to your own domain name so when they type either your original blog name or your domain name, both will go to your blogger blog. It is an easy, attractive and flexible blog engine. It doesn’t have as nice a built-in statistics page as wordpress, but you can use Google Analytics (which is nice, but isn’t real time) or any other stats tools like ActiveMeter or Sitemeter or ShinyStat (or I’m sure there are others) to keep track of it.

The one thing that seems to keep a lot of people from recommending Google Blogger is that it does not allow you to back up your posts. Therefore, if anything happened to Blogger, you could lose your data. Also, you can’t move the data to another google blog if you wanted to. And looking at the hacks to backup your data, there really isn’t a good way to do it. Except…

What you can do is to create a WordPress.com blog and import your blogger data into your wordpress blog. It is very easy in WordPress.com to import posts and comments from other blog engines, basically just point and click. Then you can export the data from your wordpress blog into a file of your own. You can’t reload that file back into Google Blogger, but you have all your data and can recreate it in wordpress easily. Which is better than losing it all. And if you use a redirect to your own domain name in Blogger, if something happened, you could change the redirect to point to your Wordpress blog (for $10/credits per year, I believe). It’s a work-around, but I tried it and it works just fine.

There is some concern about losing your rank if you move (which I don’t totally understand about rank and all yet) but here is a post that explains things you can do to help with that, called “Moving from Blogger to Wordpress without Losing Traffic and Page Rank” (Actually, when I qit blogging on all my blogs and switch to one (clear.bluedei.com), I may have to figure out what all this means.) Also, as I understand, Blogger (as would be expected) integrates very well with Google Adsense, which I gather is a way to make money from your website, with advertising, I guess.

Also, if you start with Blogger, you can choose later to go to WordPress. You can’t go the other way because Blogger doesn’t have an import or export function. For the life of me, I don’t know why.

WordPress on wordpress.com: This is the most middle-of-the-road bet. It doesn’t really do anything as well as any of the others (except for import/export) but it doesn’t have anything really wrong with it either. Many people would recommend it over Blogger. But it seems that it is mostly because Blogger doesn’t provide a way to back it up and my work-around takes care of that, in my opinion. One thing that I really like about wordpress.com is that they provide an easy to use stats page that tells you how many page views you’ve had each day, which pages were viewed, how people got to your site and what they clicked while there. The one thing it doesn’t tell you is who actually viewed your site. You have to use another stats package like sitemeter or ActiveStats to see that. And Google Analytics will not give you as much information using wordpress.com as it would if you were using Blogger because it requires some code to be added that you cannot add to Wordpress.com blogs.

This appeals to all the people that Blogger and would be a better choice if:

1. You really want to be able to export your data and import it back into Wordpress easily, or want to be able to import posts/comments from other blog engines.
2. You plan to go to a WordPress blog that you host yourself and you just want to get started now with WordPress.com and then import your posts and comments into your own hosted WordPress blog.
3. AND you don’t plan to have to have commercial usage on your blog. wordpress.com’s term of service prohibits ‘commercial usage’ and you are supposed to use wordpress.org (your own hosted site) if you do…
4. UNLESS you are a big business and want wordpress to host your blog using their VIP Hosting Service that costs $600 to setup and $300/month hosting fee. If you have that kind of money, you can decide if that is worth it. Briefly looking at it, I would think not. For that kind of money, you have many, many options. But if you have that kind of money for a blog, I doubt that you are reading my post

As I said before, Wordpress.com has some drawbacks. It is not as flexible as Blogger. There are things you want to add that you can’t (but you can in Blogger). You can’t use javascript and you cannot have any commercial usage or you run the risk of being shut down. You also have to pay to redirect your blog to your own domain name (this is something you very well may want to do at some point) and for many other things too, like more upload storage space or the ability to customize your css or unlimited users.

Self-hosted Wordpress from wordpress.org: This is, in my opinion, the very best option for:

1. anyone who is ‘techie’ (understands files, uploading, ftp, unix, etc) and
2. who likes dealing with the bits and bolts, likes installing, maintaining and customizing their own blog and templates and all and
3. who has a host server to put their install on.
4. who wants to be able to do pretty much anything they want to their blog, wants to add all sorts of plug-ins and who wants to really ‘pimp their ride’.

Self-host Wordpress offers the most options and is the most flexible of any of the choices. Really, it is about the only option I’ve found for being able to have total control of your own blog, outside a CMS (content management system) like Drupal, which is extremely more powerful than just a blog engine and requires a lot more knowledge and programming know-how.

Some drawbacks of it are that you have to have a host to install it on (either your own, or from a web service that costs about $10/month) and you have to install and maintain and customize it yourself so you have to have some experience with these things and you have to want to do it or it will just be a hassle and frustrating. And your blog will only be as good and functional as you make it. It comes as basically vanilla and you have to add everything to it.
You also have to be sure your host is stable and has good backups in case something happens. The other blog engines are as stable and well-backed up as google.com and wordpress.com can make them so it doesn’t vary so much. But your own host system can be very good or very bad, depending on who you are going with.

Also, I tried exporting from my wordpress.org blog to import into my wordpress.com blog (as if I had a problem with my web host and had to move) and it didn’t move my extra pages (like about me and books I am reading). Nor of course, any of my plug-ins or customization. So it is important to save your plug-ins and files. Since they are just files on a server, you can back-up any or all of it any time you want.

Here is an article that talks about the differences between Google Blogger and self-hosted Wordpress from wordpress.org that has some good information. It is part one, but for the life of me, I can’t find part two. It still has good info.

So to me, it comes down to Google Blogger for flexibility and ease of use vs. self-hosted wordpress for control and customization. And that is a choice that depends on what you are looking for and how much you want to do.

I will post my reviews of the other, less well-known blog engines in my next post on this subject.

-Susan Mellott

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I have recently gotten into blogging and in the process, wanted to determine which blog engine I felt was best. So I created a working blog in the following engines:

• Google Blogger: AlongthePathto20.blogspot.com
• Google Blogger, redirected to my domain: BlueDei.Blogspot.com redirected to blog.bluedei.com (either of these addresses go to the same place, my google blog)
• WordPress.com (hosted on WordPress): AllThingsWeb20.wordpress.com
• WordPress.org (installed on my subdomain): clear.bluedei.com
• WordPress.com (used to test backing up a blog, this is the vanilla wordpress.com blog with just an import of my posts from my Google blog, AlongthePathto20): clearbluedei.wordpress.com
• Vox blog: smmellott.vox.com
• LiveJournal blog: smmellott.livejournal.com
• TypePad and MovableType: didn’t create because they charge for them and I would have made a “free trial” blog but it wanted me to select a plan and put in my charge card info and I gather the free trial meant I could cancel it for free. So of course, I didn’t do anything with either of these.
• UPDATE: just added Instant Spot: clearbluedei.instantspot.com (this is just another blog engine I found) NOTE: click on the blog tab.

You can go take a look at each of these to see how they look.

I have been actively customizing, testing and using the Google blogger blog: Alongthepathto20 and the Wordpress.com blog: allthingsweb20 and the wordpress.org blog: clear.bluedei.com.

These 3 were my primary test cases and I have been copying any post I write to each of them. I have also been trying out their different features and seeing what they can and can’t do. So they are all highly customized.

The others I created for testing some particular feature (like redirecting a google blog to a domain name or testing the import feature of wordpress.com) or for trying some of the other, less popular blogs just to compare and see if they had something worth looking at. The vox and livejournal blogs I did very little customizing to. I mostly just set a template and posted a post and poked around.

I also found this one called InstantSpot after my testing. I know nothing about it but may set up a blog on it to test it. Then I’ll update this list with my Instant Spot blog. UPDATE: created an instant spot blog and added to the list above.

I did not test ExpressionEngine, (someone commented they use this but I didn’t look at it, might be a Content Management System) TextPattern,(actually Content Management System) Joomla, (also Content Management System) Windows Live Spaces, or B2Evolution. Nor did I test Drupal, which is considerably more than a blog and worth a whole evaluation of its own (with the other similar tools, like Joomla) Those are actually Content Management Systems so are outside the scope of this test.

So now you have what I used for my testing. Go look at each of these to get a feel for what each is basically like. And stay tuned for “Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars: Part 2 - The Results”

~Susan Mellott

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I have created a blog in both WordPress (this one) and in Blogger - Along the Path to 2.0.

I am trying to decide which I prefer and of course, they each have things I want. One thing I just did on this site using WordPress is to import all my blogs from my Google Blogger blog. That was really handy and a great way to change over to this site if I decide on WordPress.

But one thing I don’t like as well about WordPress is that I can’t seem to get to the underlying code as easily. In Blogger I can view the HTML and I have added the code to add a technorati button to it. It just seems a lot more flexible so far. But on the other hand, one of the biggest things right now for me is looking at my Blog Stats, and WordPress has a whole page dedicated to that and Blogger does not have anything, at least that I have found so far.

I also could not find out how to add widgets (beyond the standard ones) to either of these (excepting the code I put in Blogger). Sean tells me that the reason I can’t do it in WordPress is that I am not hosting my blog. Hopefully I’ll get my own web server one of these days and then I can explore that further. I wonder if it is the same issue in Blogger. I’d love to be able to add new page elements to my Blog and drag and drop them, which is really nice in Blogger and OK in Wordpress.

And of course, I am a newbie to both of these systems (and to web page coding in general) so I will learn as I go. I’ve certainly figured out a ton of little things so far. Just like anything, at first everything is time-consuming and difficult. As I figure out some of the basics, it becomes easier.

I would greatly appreciate your comments about which Blog engine you like, and why!

Update: Here is another look at these 2 blog engines. Also, read my next post for info on using Google Analytics for tracking Blogger (was Blogspot).

~Susie

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