Blogger versus Wordpress revisited

If you look back, the first post on this blog was agonising over what blogging system to use. At the time, my reasoning for choosing Blogger was that it was quick to get started with.

And that was true. Provided you already have a Google account, you can make a blog in a few clicks. There's a simple interface for entering posts: you can enter raw HTML or use something that looks more like a word processor. Even if you know very little about how the web works, it makes publishing straightforward. It's cost-free to use too, even if you're using your own domain name.

However, the limitations of Blogger soon became apparent:

• The default templates available look dated. (Though you could well modify them or install one from elsewhere). Furthermore, for the default template I used, which was fairly plain, it wasn't even possible to read the site properly without JavaScript: half of the page content would not be displayed. Code snippets, which I've often used in posts, are also hard to read because there's no syntax highlighting.

• The mobile template for Blogger interprets swiping left or right across the screen as meaning that you want to move to a different article. This is frustrating enough even when you know about it as it's easy to trigger unintentionally. It's more confusing for someone visiting your site for the first time. As mobile internet browsing increases, the needs of viewers on those devices becomes more important.

• Personally, I found writing posts on Blogger to be clumsy. The WYSIWYG editor is quite limited. If you want anything outside of the fairly limited feature set (for example, footnotes, or more control over images), you need to edit the HTML directly. The HTML that the editor creates seems to get polluted with unnecessary tags quite often, especially if you're switching fonts (e.g. between code and non-code sections).

  I've also accidentally lost work due to having two copies of the post creator open, with one overwriting the contents of the other unintentionally on save.

  To work around this, towards the end of my Blogger use, I was writing posts in Markdown¹ completely separately, converting them from Markdown to HTML, then pasting the HTML into Blogger, fixing up things and adding images. Writing posts in Markdown was convenient, the subsequent wrangling of the HTML output to Blogger was not.

• The current, published form of the blog posts is that which is stored in Google's servers. Keeping a local copy and tracking any changes made in posts was a chore, so I never bothered.

• Blogger isn't software available for you to run on your own computer, so you're at Google's mercy. If Google change something that you find particularly detrimental, or if they ever decided to drop it completely, you'll be forced elsewhere.

So, what are the alternatives?

The main off the shelf solutions seem to be Wordpress or static site generators. Wordpress is very popular for building blogs, and actually resolves many of my Blogger complaints.

One big plus is that it's open source (see wordpress.org). This means you can run it anywhere you like, though you'll have to pay to host it somewhere. Alternatively, you can host your blog at wordpress.com for free, albeit with possible ads and without the use of your own domain name. Resolving these problems is simple: just give them money!

Wordpress is also a step up from Blogger in terms of customisability, with a much larger user community around it. Because of this, there's far more in the way of themes and plugins to tweak your blog how you want it. Researching just now, I discovered Markdown is supported for writing posts, which is great. And some previous history of your posts are saved (25 revisions at the time of writing), with the ability to revert and compare them.

But, having used Wordpress at work, there were still three big reasons why Wordpress didn't seem a suitable replacement:

• Cost of hosting. This isn't particularly high, but my blog is just a side project, so I'd rather keep the costs minimal. Blogger is free: any other possible solution is competing with that.

• Wordpress uses PHP, which I know nothing about. It's unlikely, but if I ever did want to do any low-level customisation, I'd need to learn it.

• Wordpress seems too heavy-handed for what I need: a simple way of presenting text-based articles on the web. This is reflected both in its frequent security updates (though an automatic update option is available) and its byzantine menus which ordinarily see me clicking every option exhaustively until I find the setting I want to change.

That's not to say Wordpress is a bad option — lots of sites do use it — just that it wasn't the right option for me. For my use case, which is sharing things I've written, static site generators seemed a better fit. I'll describe the advantages of those in a later post.