g4ry.net

My previous web hosting company sucked. Not only did they lose my website, which i spent countless hours designing, but they also seemed to gradually degrade to about a 50% uptime. Being fed up with it all, i decided to switch to one of the popular free blog hosting sites.

I initially turned to wordpress.com. Having previously used the Wordpress software, i was familiar with it, and enjoyed it's features. But I decided to also give Google's Blogger.com a try, as it is from a respectable company who definately isn't going to fold any time soon.

I know there are countless other options available, one of the largest being Livejournal.com. I have used their service in the past, and knew they weren't for me. They seem to appeal more to community oriented blogs, which is great, just not what I'm looking for.

I decided to write this comparison of the two services, and hopefully by the time i was finished, i would have decided which one was right for me. Hopefully someone else will find this comparison useful; it's not intended to promote one service over the other, but rather to highlight key differences, which are useful in deciding which one is right for you.

Layout / Site Appearance

Wordpress.com has a large selection of themes available to choose from (I counted 66) making it simple to immediately customize your blog. With 26 of these themes, you can upload your own custom header image. And that's where the customizing ends. Unfortunately, Wordpress.com does not allow you to upload your own custom templates. The will allow you to do some customization of the CSS of a base template, if you pay them $15 / year. Although they claim their reasons for this are security purposes, it severely limits the amount you can customize your blog.

On the surface, Blogger.com looks even worse. They have 16 standard templates to choose from. Sure, most of them have sub-options, technically making the template count around 38, but most of these are just simple color scheme changes. Then I noticed the "Edit HTML" tab. Blogger allows you to completely edit the CSS and HTML of the template, as well as upload / download them freely. This allows for a virtually unlimited amount of customization to be done to your blog.

Because of the ability to edit the templates (without having to pay $15 / yr), Blogger wins hands down in this category (in my opinion). Of course, this is not very significant to anyone who has no intention of customizing their blog, and is content with simply using a standard template.

Widgets / Addons

Both sites have the ability to add various widgets to your blog. These accomplish various things, from adding lists to your side bar, to embedding picture or text RSS feeds. Honestly, I didn't really find one to have a major advantage over the other; however, it is worth noting that Blogger allows you to embed custom Javascript, which adds a LOT of possibilities. I also favored Blogger's layout editor. I found it had more flexibility in designing the layout of your blog. Your mileage may vary, but I preferred Blogger in this area.

Tags / Categories

Using a blog in place of a website leads to some amount of disorganization. This blog in particular, being of a general nature, will include posts pertaining to various topics of interest. The ability to sort these topics into categories is a necessity.

The method that Blogger uses for categorization is that of tags (which they call Labels). Simply put, and post can have just one, or a number of tags applied to it. When navigating the blog by tag, any posts containing that common tag will be displayed.

Categories is another method of organizing, which provides a slightly less chaoitic hierarchial system. Wordpress.com has retained their system of categories, and has also added Tags. The uber-neat freak can use both in conjunction to keep their posts well organized.

If you need a better explanation of the differences between the two, here is a link to Wordpress.com's FAQ covering the topic: http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/the-difference-between-tags-and-categories/

My take on it is quite simple. Tags (Labels) are enough to organize anything I'll be doing; however, the option to use both does lend to the possibility of a higher degree of sorting / organizing.

Multi-User Blogs

Blogger.com allows you to have up to 100 authors defined for each blog. Further, the blog can be made private, and have up to 100 readers defined.

Wordpress.com has a similar setup, however, they limit the number of users per blog to 35. The limit is removed completely at a cost of $30 / yr.
Wordpress also has different levels of users that can be defined, including Contributor, Administrator, Editor, and Author.

Wordpress.com also includes a simple password protection feature. At time of posting, you can choose to add a password to a post. In order for anyone to view the post, or any comments made on the post, they have to enter the password.

Overall, these features do not apply to my situation at all, and are only necessary for collaborative projects, but I think the password feature offered by Wordpress.com is a nice feature.

Site Tracking

Wordpress.com has built in site tracking. This is a big deal to some people, and so it's worth mentioning. It is also worth mentioning that Blogger.com allows 3rd party scripts to be embedded, adding far more robust tracking ability. If you're looking for off the shelf functionality, wordpress.com has it. In the long run, Blogger has more options available in this area.

Navigation / Search

The search features of both sites are more than adequate. The Navbars that both sites places at the top of your page is similar, however the one at Wordpress.com does have more options available.

Ads

Wordpress.com does not allow you to place any advertisements on your blog. The do, however, state that they may occasionally place text ads (Google Adsense) on your blog.

Blogger.com does not place ads on your site, and fully allows (obviously) Google Adsense ads to be easily incorporated into your blog.

Posting Content

Both sites have a standard WYSIWYG editor, as well as HTML editing mode. The editors are similar, and have everything that you'd require. Wordpress.com's WYSIWYG has a collapsable second line which they call the "Kitchen Sink", which Blogger fits all the essentials on one line of buttons. Wordpress.com's HTML editing pane also has more buttons, but in this editing mode i doubt that buttons are of much concern (to me, at least).

Wordpress has the option to post as either a blog article, or as a static page. This is a great option for making your blog more like a full featured website. Blogger.com has no similar option.

Wordpress.com also has the ability to post content as a link, which will end up in your Blogroll; this feature is matched on Blogger.com, in the form of a Links widget which is added to your sidebar. I actually preferred the Blogger.com one, as you could rename it, and not be stuck with "Blogroll". Not a big deal though. UPDATE: Upon further investigation, Wordpress.com allows you to create custom link categories.

Blogger.com allows you to post to your blog via email or MMS from a mobile phone. This was one of the first features i tried on Blogger, and was quite impressed. You simply send an email to a pre-defined address, with a Subject line that will become your post's title, and the body of the message will become your post. You can even also attach photos, and they'll be added to you post. Wordpress.com has no similar feature.

The reason I am quite impressed with the post-by-email option, is that I often find myself stuck on a dialup internet connection. This allows me to write an article while offline, and then simply connect and send an email, without having to navigate any slow-loading web pages on dialup.

Wordpress has an option to convert emoticons such as :-) into actual graphics. I couldn't find any such option on Blogger.com.

Comments / Spam

Blogger.com allows you to turn off comments completely, or allow various levels of commenting. You can set comments to private, registered, or open. The registered option not only includes google.com registered users, but also allows for OpenID to be used, which is a nice feature.

Spam prevention is accomplished at Blogger.com by means of either turning on comment moderation, or turning on a word verification (Captcha).

Wordpress.com has a much more robust spam prevention system (Akismet).
You can turn moderation on or off, and also set various levels of moderation.
You can set comments to be allowed if their author has a previously approved comment, filter comments by keywords, number of links they contain, etc.
You can also require a name and email address for comments.

Overall, Wordpress.com is far ahead in the spam prevention area, but I do like Blogger.com's inclusion of OpenID.

Multimedia Posting

Blogger.com allows for uploading of photos with a max. filesize of 8MB. Jpg, gif, bmp, and png are the allowed extension. The maximum allowed storage space for all your photos is 1GB. Blogger.com uses Picasa Web Albums for their picture hosting.
There is no built in gallery viewer, but you can sign into Picasa to view / manage all your photos.
Blogger.com allows for videos (avi,mpg,quicktime,real, wmv) of up to 100MB filesize to be uploaded. These are hosted on Google Video.
There is no audio uploading available on Blogger.com.

Wordpress.com allows for uploading of photos (jpg, jpeg, png, gif), documents (pdf, doc, odt) and presentations (ppt) with their free account. The maximum storage space is 3GB for all your files combined. There is a built in gallery / media viewer.
For a paid space upgrade, you can upload audio (mp3, m4a, ogg, wav) and videos (avi, mp4, mpg, mov, wmv) to wordpress.com up to a maximum filesize of 75MB.

Wordpress.com's paid space upgrades are as follows:
5 Gigabytes - $20 / yr
15 Gigabyte - $50 / yr
25 Gigabyte - $90 / yr

Although Blogger's video hosting size is seemingly unlimited, the 1 GB limit of the photo hosting can be overcome with Google.com's storage upgrades (which are shared across all Google services):
10 Gigabyte - $20 /yr
40 Gigabyte - $75 / yr
150 Gigabyte - $250 / yr
400 Gigabyte - $500 / yr

My take on this? First of all, I post all my videos to Youtube.com, so that's not an issue. Both sites allow inline linking of Youtube.com videos. Secondly, using other sites such as Flickr.com for the bulk of one's photos is much more reasonable. I will definately make use of the photo hosting on occasion, when I just want to include a random picture or two in my blog post. The free 1 GB from Blogger.com is ample for this, as is the 3GB from Wordpress.com. I will never use any of the paid upgrades, but if audio hosting were included free, I would occasionally use it.

Domain Name

Both sites give you a free 3rd level domain name for your blog. Blogger gives you http://yourblogname.blogspot.com, and Wordpress gives you http://yourblogname.wordpress.com.

Both hosts also allow the use of your top level domain (www.yourdomain.com).

Blogger.com offers this at no charge if you already have your domain name registered. It's a simple matter of setting up a CNAME record to point to google's servers, and your done. You can also set up Google Apps to have gmail host your domain's email. If you don't have your domain name purchased already, you can purchase it through Google for $10 / yr, and have it set up automatically (along with Google Apps).

Wordpress.com charges $10 / yr if you already have your domain registered elsewhere. You have to point to their DNS servers, which means you cannot use your domain for email as well (you have no control over your MX records). I'm suspicious that you could possibly get away with retaining your own DNS server and using a CNAME, but I can't confirm this.
You can also register a domain through them, at a cost of $15 / yr, but you'll still have to go without email.

Conclusion

I decided to go with Blogger.com for a number of reasons. The biggest reason for me was that I got all the features that I wanted from Blogger.com for free, whereas with Wordpress.com, i would be paying $25 / year. This is the best option for my particular uses, but is by no means the right option for everyone.