Did everyone with a Blogger.com blog get a “Spam Blog” notice in the last few days? My Blogger account is still active, so I got one, too. It seems they just shotgunned those out to everyone in an effort to shut down any blog that’s not updated anymore or something. (Either that, or someone’s reporting a shitload of pro-gun leaning blogs as “spam”.)
I switched to WordPress in January, and I’ve never regretted making the switch. Cleaner and more varied templates, a faster interface, integrated Stats, and (so far) no bullshit like the “YOU IZ SPAM BLOGZ” stuff that Blogger is pulling right now. Also, the Comments on WordPress are not secure HTTP like they are on Blogger, which means that reading through comments on a WordPress post is about 1000% faster for me than reading them on a Blogger post. Blogger loads all its comment elements via HTTPS, which is super-slow over satellite, so whenever I want to leave a comment on someone’s Blogger blog, I have to wait for the form to refresh five or six times before typing the comment, because every time it loads another element, the comment text gets wiped out with the refresh. I can’t even count how many of my comments have evaporated into the Intertubes because I was a little too eager to start typing before Blogger had loaded every last graphic on the Comments form.
The nice thing about the migration to WordPress was the Import feature, which lets you migrate an existing Blogger blog in its entirety: all the posts, pictures, and comments get migrated in, as if those posts had been written on your WordPress blog from the start. It took about 30 minutes over my not-so-high-speed satellite connection to migrate, it involved only one click of the mouse, and everything came over without a problem. You can sign up for a WordPress blog, migrate your blog to see how it would look and work, and then just keep posting on Blogger if you end up hating WordPress…the migration process doesn’t change a byte on the Blogger side.
The only thing WordPress lacks in comparison is the ability to run scripts on the free blogs, which means I can’t have any of those Amazon recommendation thingies or other scripted widgets in my sidebar, but that’s an acceptable trade to me.
Anyway…screw Blogger. They ticked me off well before they started to accuse everyone of being a spammer just to have an excuse to cull dead blogs, so I feel vindicated for having made the switch months ago. WordPress is to Blogger what Firefox is to Internet Explorer, seriously.
13 Comments
August 3, 2008 at 6:03 am
“WordPress is to Blogger what Firefox is to Internet Explorer, seriously.”
How much did WordPress pay you to include that line?
August 3, 2008 at 6:37 am
Nothing…yet. Maybe one of their higher-ups will read this entry and send some cash and/or freebies. I can be bought, you know.
August 3, 2008 at 7:13 am
*sigh*
Some of us are too small potatoes to get picked up…
Someday.
Once the Teletubby bayonet video goes viral…
August 3, 2008 at 7:13 am
Ahhh, the great dream of the young up-and-comer in the 21st Century – selling out!
I’ve been trying to sell out for ages. Got a huge pile of return receipts. Very sad.
August 3, 2008 at 9:04 am
Oddly, none of my three blogs drew an email.
The things holding me back are:
1) I need my widgets. I don’t make a ton of money off my blog ads and Amazon commissions, but it’s a trip to the grocery store once a month or a tank of gas or a smaller utility bill.
2) If I went to for-pay hosting, I start having to worry about bandwidth, and remembering to pay hosting bills, and renewing domain names, and you know how responsible I am about stuff like that.
3) Bigger people than me are still getting functionality out of blogger. Dr. Helen gets half again to twice as much traffic as I do. Ann Althouse gets some unimaginable multiple of my hits. Helen’s making noises about at least looking at moving, but Ann seems determined to stick it out.
I dunno.
Don’t mind me, though; I’m so terrifically un-hip that I have an AOhelL email add’y.
(…at least this isn’t like the guy who emailed me to tell me that serious blogs used the format he did. I couldn’t help but think “Buddy, you get a hundred and fifty hits a day, I get two thousand. Serious blogs use what?“)
August 3, 2008 at 11:21 am
I don’t need widgets. Reminds me of MySpace. I do like WordPress, because it’s clean.
PS-I’m in Woodland Hills visiting my parents, and this home invasion robbery took place. I thought of you immediately. The robbers were shot from the inside, from the home owner, who was armed and prepared.
http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_10074324
August 3, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Maybe when I start pulling down a living wage again, I won’t need cheesy ads on my blog again, either.
Icky capitalism mucks with my artsy sensibilities.
August 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Where you keepin’ those? OMG, not the attic?
August 3, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Oh, schnap.
August 3, 2008 at 4:41 pm
*examines jar*
Got the heart of a liberal, too.
Dunno which one, though.
August 3, 2008 at 4:43 pm
*blink blink*
I like the new decor. Not sure about the strip of wallpaper trim on the comment boxes, but the bright-and-airy looks very cool.
August 3, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Huh. I didn’t get the spamblog note.
August 4, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Incidentally, I dislike the template you’ve just switched to. My wimpy old eyes prefer me to surf with my IE7 text size set to “larger” or “largest” so as not to strain them on tiny fonts. Your new template just super-biggifies the headlines without even slightly biggifying the regular text. The obnoxiously oversized headlines look horrible, sure. But more important: I cannot comfortably read the body of the messages. Annoying!