Comparing Blogger.com and WordPress.com

For the past few weeks, I have been comparing the free blogging facilities offered by Blogger.com and WordPress.com.

First, the similarities:

• Both are free.
• Both have fairly easy-to-use Web user interfaces.
• Both let you create private blogs and limited-access blogs.
• Both allow readers to post comments; both allow comment moderation and spam control.
• Both allow a single user ID to have multiple blogs.
• Both allow blogs to have multiple authors.
• Both let you display your tag counts: Blogger calls them “Labels” and WordPress calls them “tags”.

Now, the differences.

Where Blogger scrores:

• Blogger lets you add javascript to your pages. Because WordPress does not, you may not be able to add to your blog third-party widgets that use javascript.
• Blogger lets you customise the CSS of your blog. Because WordPress does not, you are limited by their themes; as a consolation, you can change the picture in the header of their themes. Also, because WordPress themes cannot be customised, you cannot add third-party javascript to the CSS. Google Analytics, for example, needs you to add a code snippet in the CSS.
• Blogger lets you analyse your blog through Google Analytics. Because WordPress has only a stat tool, it’s analytical potential is limited only to the number of visits to your blog.

Where WordPress scores:

• WordPress lets you add Pages (in addition to Posts). Pages are static (unlike posts, which keep changing according to your “Recent posts” settings). And Pages, if you choose the correct theme, appear as tabs at the top of your blog screen. WordPress, thus, offers you a combination of a journal (of posts) and a notebook (of pages). The workaround I could think for Blogger is: Add a text gadget to the sidebar, and put your page text into it. Not a very elegant workaround if the content of your page is something on the lines of, say, “Frequently asked questions”.
• WordPress lets you nest pages. This is my favourite feature – it gives me an almost TOC-like facility for the blog.
• WordPress lets you control who can see individual pages. This control is in addition to the blog-level access control.
• WordPress lets you import the contents from another blog; even a non-WordPress one.
• WordPress lets you put the spotlight on your blog visitors; it has a “Recent Comments” widget
• WordPress lets you highlight your most popular posts through a “Top Posts” widget. The workaround I could think for Blogger is: Add a text gadget to the sidebar, and enter the posts you think are top (through your Google Analytics data).
• WordPress lets you add tag your posts into categories; so, you have two levels of tagging – one as tags and another as categories. You can have clouds for both on your blog. Blogger has only labels.

An ideal blogging solution according to me would be any of the following:

• Blogger + Page-like feature + multi-tagging of posts + Recent-comments widget + Top-posts widget + Page-level access control
• WordPress + Google-Analytics-like features + javascript functionality

But hey! Am I asking too much? The product in question is supposed to be a blog, not a Web domain.

If it’s not easy to use, it’s not used

Debates about Microsoft Word vs. Adobe Framemaker appear with regular frequency on the tech-writing mailing lists I am subscribed to. Everyone agrees Frame is an awesome publishing tool. Yet, everyone keeps cribbing about it. So, why does a bright bunch of people who are masters at figuring out stuff, otherwise known as tech-writers, only hesitatingly agree Frame is “kind of great”?

Confession: I love Frame.

I think it’s mostly because Frame is so difficult to use. Its user interface is not intuitive (it doesn’t even have a print preview), and its Help sucks big time. Word, on the contrary, has a fantastic Help, and a user interface so easy even a child can use Word. Developers love Word – they can open Word files in any browser (or even WordViewer or Open Office), and they can review Word docs easily by putting in coloured lines of text (most I know never use the Track change or Comment features). Try turning a black word into red in Frame – and you need to go through a process!

“So what the heck”, thinks a bright techwriter. “If I can learn Frame, I might as well learn XML.” And thus is born a host of companies who get in place a documentation system that can handle big documents effortlessly (the single-most crib against Word) and can also offer single-sourcing (Frame’s big plus): their docs are written in XML by writers who need not worry about structure and formatting, which are taken care of by the XSL, DTD or FOSI that the consultant came in and wrote for a one-time fee. And their XML docs still get converted to HTML-like things that developers can open in their browsers and add their red-ink comments to.

And Word continues to sell – in the home segment as well as in the office (as a part of the Office Suite) – at rates and at volumes that keeps Microsoft happy and profitable. Frame, on the other hand, is so steeply priced that even companies think before buying it – and its steep learning curve doesn’t help.

If something is not easy to use, am I going to use it?