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Blogger Pros & Cons

I have recently transferred my blog from Blogger http://babdullah.blogspot.com to my own hosted WordPress, which is great. Now my experience with Blogger hasn’t been bad at all, and I won’t suggest to all to do the same thing. However, no matter what, a blog hosted by other party must have some limitations. From my short experience with Blogger, I list below the Pros & Cons I came across.

Pros:

• Quick setup time: Within few minutes, and without any technical knowledge, you can have your blog site up and running.
• Simplicity: The nice formatting editor, ease of uploading and inserting images makes it really convenient.
• Quick exposure: Since your blog is hosted by Google Blogger, it automatically gets added to their indexing engine, and the Google News service I think I was wrong here. It gets added to Blog Search only. I have some Google News Alerts setup, and whenever I blog about the same topic, I get the Alert next day in my email. So if people are alerting for a hot topic you are writing about, you can guess how many hits you may get. There is also the links to this post on Google Official Blog. Whenever you write and link to a post on Google official blog, it will be added to their list of Linking In articles. In addition to all of that, many people will start reaching your page from other Blogger pages through the Blogger header if you have it activated. This all cuts things short and easy for you instead of waiting for sites to index and include your site in their News service.
• Easy add to Google Personalized Page.
• Ability to switch to your custom domain. Though I haven’t tried it, but they give the option to point your registered domain to your Blogger account.

Cons:

• Can’t add your own pages and features. Blogger gives you the ability to blog, and have a profile page. It does this so good, but thats all about it. You cannot have other pages like Contact Me or something like that. What people do is they post a blog with very old date, and link to it as Contact page. In addition to that, you cannot add your own features like mailing group, voting, and any other type of dynamic pages.
• Pinging restriction: You only get the option to ping (notify) Weblogs.com of new posts, which is not bad, but you may want additional flexibility.
• Up time: Occasionally I get 404 response for mine and other blogger pages as well. Yesterday for example both my and Google RSS feeds were not loading, while all other non Blogger feeds were OK, so it didn’t seem like a problem from my side.
• No export feature: Sadly, Eric Schmidt have talked about how Google wants to make it easy for the users to take their data and go somewhere else if they like to, but this has not been the case with Blogger. There is no Export feature, and rather I found individual posted workarounds. Unfortunately, those didn’t seem to work as well. They included modification to the template, and the code suggested as a template was not accepted by Blogger because it was not properly formatted. Maybe this is a new checking in the just out of Beta Blogger release. Eventually, I had no choice but to copy/paste post by post and comment by comment. I did not see that feature from WordPress, but as long as you are hosting it, you can always get a dump of the data from the database.
• Terms of service: Although their terms are not so strict, but still it will forbid and control your move in the future in commercial terms. So if you are looking for some real strong blog which you can turn into business later on, perhaps you would feel more comfortable hosting the blog your self and not having to worry about any legal terms.
• Subcategory: While Blogger makes it extremely convenient to categorize posts with their auto-complete AJAX powered suggestion feature, you still can’t make category parent and child. So you can’t have Ruby to fall under Programming category for instance.

That may seem like I am strongly against Blogger, but the fact is I am not. It depends on your intention from the blog. If you want something to share thoughts, discuss with friends and have fun, Blogger is the only thing I will suggest. If you have no technical background at all, even though WordPress are so generous and offer to do the setup for FREE, I still think you should still stick to Blogger. If you have some technical programming skills, WordPress takes only 5 minutes to setup. It will take sometime to know where all the bits and pieces are and be able to customize it, but as I said, you can customize it! You can also search for the available free plugins on the internet.

I hope this small post helps some of you make their choice.

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