Friday, June 18, 2010

A review of three blogging websites, or, I've moved: again

So, I've moved my blog again. I decided to move my blog from Wordpress, at http://zagorath.wordpress.com to Google's Blogger, at http://zagorath.blogspot.com. The reasons for this are simple: Wordpress is not. I found Wordpress to be far too complicated for my uses. It was way too complicated for me.

When I was using Tumblr, I loved how easy it was to customise and edit the design. It was, however, lacking some very noticeable things. There was absolutely no in-built comment system, and no clear method for RSS. The problem with Tumblr is that it's not really a conventional blog system. It's not open enough. Tumblr is made to be used by people in Tumblr — it's a closed system, more of a social networking site than a blogging site. And because of that, I couldn't really use it for my blog.

So then I switched to Wordpress. Wordpress is an incredibly powerful blogging tool, and it is also amazingly customisable. But that's the problem. It's far too powerful, and too confusing for me. With Wordpress, you pretty much have the option of using an in-built theme, or going all-out and creating your own. It's very difficult to make many small changes. Most themes don't even allow you to have a custom background. While I'm sure Wordpress would be far superior for a serious blogger, or a web developer or something, for me, it's just far too complicated.

So that brings me to my current situation. I'm currently using Blogger. I already have a Google account, so it was really easy to set up. I've now got the advantage of being able to more easily customise my blog. For me, one disadvantage is that there are no "categories", only labels, which do the same thing as tags. Another problem is that it seems much more complicated to get Blogger to automatically Tweet with a new blog post. It has the added advantage, however, of allowing readers to comment using a variety of logins, including their Wordpress accounts, should they chose to use them.

As always, I encourage any feedback on this that you may have. What have been your experiences with any of these three blogging tools, or any others you may have come across?

2 comments:

  1. For simple auto-tweets, I suggest http://twitterfeed.com/

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  2. @Ziaix I had tried it, but it didn't seem to work. Maybe next time I blog it'll work. I've made a few small changes to it.
    I'll just have to wait until I get some new inspiration :P

    In other news, it would appear that Blogger does not allow comment replies. Not a huge problem though, because it at least allows comments (unlike Tumblr...)

    By the way, you can sign in with your Wordpress account if you want to. It should get you a link.

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