Blog software: still playing with Wordpress

Like a number of others who have got fed up with the "new" Blogger's lack of functionality, I've been trying Wordpress, and so far I don't see any advantage.

In fact the old Blogger seemed to be a lot better than Wordpress, and what has happened is that since Google took over Blogger, they have just removed all the features that used to make Blogger better than Wordpress, so that they are now much the same, though Blogger retains a bit of flexibility in being able to arrange stuff in the sidebar more easily.

Wordpress does seem to handle comments slightly better -- you don't have to type in a series of letters a bazillion times to get the comment to "take" -- and in Blogger, if it doesn't take, there's no warning. It tells you if your comment has been saved, but it doesn't tell you it hasn't, so I suspect a lot of comments are lost because people think the comment has been saved and close the comment window without scrolling down to check.

But both are way ahead of Typepad, which nine times out of ten responds to attempts to post a comment with a "Server error" message.

But the things that drew me to Blogger in the first place, that made me think "this is cool", are still gone:

1. Blog this
   
2. Being able to click on interests, or favourite books or music, and see who else has similar tastes
   
3. The "Search all blogs" feature
   
4. Being able to get back to the dashboard directly from the blog
   

There are problably other things, but those are the main ones. But in most of them, WordPress doesn't seem to have any significant advantages.

But my WordPress blog, Khanya, is still there, and I'll carry on playing with it and use it for blogging miscellaneous stuff that doesn't seem to fit in elsewhere.

Trying out WordPress

It seems like ages since I switched to the "fully-featured" new Blogger, only to discover that half the features don't work, including a lot that worked quite well in the old Blogger, like "Blog this", which was one of the things that persuaded me to start this blog on blogger in the first place.

So like a lot of other people, I've got tired of waiting for the bugs to be fixed, and have been toying with WordPress, and have started a new experimental blog over there. Of course nothing's perfect, and WordPress doesn't have, and never had a "Blog this" feature. And the "text widgets" for the sidebar are a bit of a pain, and it seems much harder to get them right than putting stuff in the sidebar in Blogger (though I haven't switched to the new templates yet, and I'm dead scared to do that).

But I think leaving comments is easier in WordPress. I suspect that Blogger loses half the comments that people enter, because they enter the comments, enter the funny letters, and then close the comment window thinking their comment has been saved, when all the time Blogger is asking for another set of letters to be typed, even if the first lot were typed correctly. But Blogger doesn't tell you that it's waiting for this, so I think many would-be commenters are not aware of it.

But in that respect even Blogger is better than Typepad, which swills the comments round in its mouth for 10 minutes like a wine taster, and then spits them out as says "Server error".