If you blog, you too might have faced the question of what blogging platform to use to put up your thoughts in front of the world. In this post, I offer my two cents on the topic, especially for those who are either about to start blogging or looking for alternatives on being fed up with their current blog-hosting website.
When I wrote my first blog post, I put it up on Blogger. For a long time, I cared little to promote my blog or get more subscribers. When I later felt that I’d rather connect with the outside world through my blog than via Facebook (which I think is for the people who love showing off) or Twitter (where the 140 character-limit was too restraining sometimes), I decided to first improve the aesthetics of my blog. And thus began my urge to jump ship to some other blogging platform!
First, I wanted to enhance the look and feel of my blog, and the options Blogger provided made me feel handicapped! The number of built-in themes are few. You can download a theme from third-party websites, but then you’d have to configure every such theme to make it work. For example, you have n number of widgets currently on your blog. Now, when you upload a new theme, all your widgets would be gone and you’ll have to manually bring them back. Every time you try a new theme!
Apart from that, Google does a country-specific url-redirection of a blog (meaning that a .blogspot.com part of your blog url would change to .blogspot.in if you are viewing the blog in India) which, though can be prevented, looked ugly. Another important thing that Blogger lacked was some sort of a community where I could connect with fellow bloggers.
In search of an alternative, I turned to Tumblr. But I, then, read somewhere that Tumblr is more suited to folks looking to write short Twitter-like posts or ones containing visuals and not for serious writers.
I turned to Wordpress and suddenly, I found everything that Blogger lacked. It has so many built-in themes that you probably would never want to go searching for one somewhere else. And these themes just work out of the box! There is a default follow button on the top of every Wordpress blog. Moreover, when I tried to import my Blogger blog to Wordpress, everything happened seamlessly keeping the dates, tags, comments etc. intact!
I’ve been on Wordpress for about a month now and I think I’ll stay here for long.