Where my blog resides...

This was a rather tough decision. Trust me. It was.
I mentioned in my last-to-last post that I might be shifting my blog to Wordpress. After evangelizing it, and making another friend shift from his blogger blog to a wordpress blog, I myself assessed whether I should shift or not. Especially since I had a [very small amount of] traffic coming here and feared that shifting might make me lose even that!
So I summed up what all I thought Wordpress could give me and what I'd thought Blogger couldn't. Since I was competing Blogger with free Wordpress hosting, my inal verdict was in favour of Blogger. No doubt, WP[.org] services on paid hosting are par imaginable excellence, I will stick to Blogger until I get my own domain.
Wordpress gives:

1. Upload "blog Picture" which then becomes your blog's favicon
2. It gives you the option to insert Meta tags in your posts which help improve SEO of your blog's content. One of the grounsd due to which my blog got a porrwebsite score on the grader from Hubspot, beside.
3. It also gives you the option to give your images a caption and specify the alt text, right as you upload it, so without any hassle, your images become more searchable. That is absolutely essential for images of blogs like mine since I wish my images do come up in image searches of relevant things.
4. It has a much more beautiful Dashboard. [Ah! Now you can't accept this without seeing it. Wordpress 2.7 I believe is one of the best things to happen to Blogging! :)]
5. It is faster, built with much better AJAX.
6. Its image uploading is far more comfortable than in Blogger, and also, has a resizable post editor box, which can even be stretched to fullscreen. If you've cared to upload images in Blogger, you would've seen how the image comes in the top of the post, and how, if your image is large, it takes a huge amount of effort to drag it down and below at the end of the text, where it ought to be. Also, the post editor is amazingly rigid, and sometimes, the HTML editor does stretch out, but rarely, if ever, does my Visual editor show the ability to expand or resize.
7. Wordpress is much more actively spreading, and evolving. Blogger is like a dead creature in front of the pace with which Wordpress has developed. Also, this rapid progress, has lent it to be a better and stabler platform than Blogger is. More often than not, blogger tells you that its experienced an error with a freakingly scary and long code. It tells you could discuss this with other blogger bloggers who've experienced the problem and have a thread with the error code in the subject. Twice now, and that too with different errors, Blogger's forum has been of no help as nobody's cared to post anything pertaining to the topic. [Neither did I in fact. I had no idea what to, actually!]
8. Way better and more professional themes with heavy customizability, and a small array of widgets, but each with a specific aim. Also, unlike Blogger's many widgets, the widgets Wordpress does choose and offer, are well tested and never stop working. :) If you know the "This widget is broken sign" I'm talking about which often comes up on the blog, publicly (and rather shamelessly) if the widget wasn't from the right "coder".
   

What Blogger gives, in return (or how I overcame the problems, and in the face of such adversity and doubt, managed to stick to my original blog):

1. I have learnt of a method to put up a favicon in blogger thanks to Blogger's open permission to me to edit the source code of my template.
   
2. I now use scribefire. A purely outstanding Firefox add-on, which is in effect an in-browser post editor. It not only lets me insert Technorati tags, it also lets me choose servers from which I can choose to receive ping-backs. I don't really know how that worls, but the description has a nice ring to it. :)(I am writing this post in ScribeFire, since at this precise moment, I am entirely offline.)
3. I decided to care to remember to do that manually by going into the
   HTML editor everytime I insert an image. Really helpless in such a case.
4. [Beautiful Dashboard] Can't be matched - will have to do without it.
5. Again can't be matched... Actually Scribefire not only matches the ease and speed, it beats it in the fact that ScribeFire is entirely offline.
6. ScribeFire uploads the image properly, but offers another trouble in exchange. It does not resize the image according to my themes posting space, and the image, especially those which I make with my customary 800X800 dimensions, get entirely screwed up. But I manage...
   
7. Now I really can't match the evolution of the platform by anything except for the fact, that ScribeFire's developing just as fast (or so I like to think).
   

Wordpress fanboys, including my brother insist that I use ScribeFire for my wordpress blog. Blogger, and everything google, sucks. (I'll explain that later on when I have even more time at hand). I believe another one of my friends would support his views. But the thing is that I've actually put some effort into customizing the feeds for this blog (and I care despite the fact that I have no subscribers apart from my bro), and also inserted too many widgets to shift them all. I like them all and after all is said and done free Blogger, also has some leads over free WP.

1. Blogger lets me freely change my template's source code, thus with cursory knowledge of XHTML and CSS, I can customize the fonts to extend beyond the regular options, like entering Lucida Grande as one of the first options for people who have it.
   
2. It lets me use any theme that works on it. WP blocks my theme usage to a select number.
3. I have 2GB of extra space. I know that by the time I get about to using 5 GB, or even 3 GB of bandwidth, I'll definitely have the money to have my own domain, but I still like to hold that reason as another justifying thing for my sticking-to-Blogger-despite-personal-hypocritic-hatred-towards-Google behaviour.
   
4. I can use interactive widgets like outbrain on my free blogger whereas there are no options for widgets like that which I can use in free WP. That is very annoying.

Oh well, I think that's about it. I know that this extensive list is of no use to anybody at all. The reason that I still post is that I wanna try to manage to make two posts per week. And such "stuff"'s gonna help do that. :)

Also, please try to subscribe to my email feed using the form beside - the 3rd from the top widget. And comment on whatever you thought about this or any other post. And you can even try giving me some starred rating using the outbrain widget that I currently use. It comes at the end of the post. :). Thnx for reading if you did. Even if you didn't thanks for visiting. At least i got a visit! :) Technorati Tags: wordpress, blogger, free wordpress, benefits of blogger,