For those who are curious about these things, are thinking about starting their own blog, or want to make a move, too, let me explain why I made the move from Blogger to WordPress, and why I’m so darn happy about it.

First, Blogger has a few, let’s say, issues. Anyone who’s tried to upload pictures and spent hours in spin mode will know what I’m talking about. WordPress uploads are nearly instantaneous. In Blogger, the interface is fairly simple but not very flexible. In WordPress, the interface is simple, well-laid out and supplied with great tools. Blogger goes down a lot for unknown reasons for long periods of time. Blogger is frustrating. A Blogger blogger will be expected to know all the ins and outs of html if they want to make any sort of change, like, for instance, adding a Blogroll or link field at the side of the page. I could have learned how to do this but I’d rather spend my time doing better things, like building models of extinct crinoids (that’s what I’m doing today). WordPress makes this easy, direct and drag and drop. I consider this a brilliant thing. Moving my entire Blogger blog over to WordPress was made simple and quick, but just so you know, if you’ve changed over to New Blogger (like New Coke, I guess), WordPress doesn’t have a utility to switch you over. I still had my Old Blogger (or would that be Classic Blogger?) account, making the switch very simple. I’m sure someone out there has a good solution or work-around for you, if you aren’t on Old Blogger. One thing I did before switching over to WordPress was to backup my whole Blogger blog, using a freeware utility for Macs called Webgrabber. It turns your whole blog, comments and all, into a single file. Here’s another site with useful hints for getting backed up before doing anything with your Blogger blog.

The WordPress dashboard is vastly more useful, with lots of good, simple, direct clickable ways to get exactly where you want to go, right away. And another benefit is the Blogstats page, where you can count your hits for every day, and every post. You can be proud, you can despair, but at least you’ll know.

And here’s one more good reason to love WordPress: just as I was about to hit the “publish” button on this very post, Firefox crashed. Had this been Blogger, I would have lost my post and there would have been a lot of cursing, and probably not much of an attempt to recreate this lengthy screed. But apparently WordPress saves automatically as you go. After I rebooted, I came back to my dashboard and found my entire post intact. That’s some good bloggin’, y’all.

If this helps someone decide between two blog services, I know my work here is done. Now, back to that crinoid…