Rich Blogging Experience Found Free at Wordpress.com

A while back I covered blogging services Blogger, TypePad, and Drupal, attempting to answer the question Should I Pay To Blog?. Since that article a newcomer has entered the fray: Wordpress. Wordpress has been free, open source code for some time, is installed on many web servers all around the world, and recognized as one of the best blog platforms. In late 2005 the developers of Wordpress decided to host Wordpress-powered blogs for free, offering users the chance at a new namespace by signing-up for a subdomain of Wordpress.com, and competing with Blogger and TypePad directly. Recently I opened a free Wordpress blog, and was very impressed by a number of things.

Import posts from Blogger

One tremendous benefit for current users of Blogger is that they can easily import all of their Blogger posts and comments, making the migration to Wordpress.com from Blogger completely painless. Wordpress.com supports other features such as Trackbacks, Password-Protected Posts, and Comments.

Import posts and comments from Blogger

Pages and Look-and-Feel

Wordpress.com as a content management system, has an important distinction over Blogger in that it allows the creation of different types of content, namely “Posts” and “Pages.” While Blogger could be enhanced to include more static content (this is the intended use for “Pages” in Wordpress), it currently supports the creation of posts only. Wordpress.com will let users create static pages such as an “About” page or “Contact” page, which helps a blog feel more like a traditional website, provides more hierarchy for navigation, and helps with search engine optimization (an “About” page can be reached by adding “/about” to the URL). My opinion is that the templates on Wordpress.com are richer and incorporate the latest Ajax effects better than the templates found on Blogger. Wordpress.com feels more “solid” as an application than Blogger, with nice typography, consistent user interfaces, and minimal clutter.

Themes have a nice look and are slightly configurable

No Scripts

One aspect of Wordpress.com hosted blogs that many potential users will see as a disadvantage is the inability to run any scripts (like JavaScript) from within your blog. Some common scripts found on blogs at the time of this writing include Flickr pictures, digg news, and AdSense, Google’s contextual program free to the public. AdSense is promoted and integrates easily with Blogger blogs. Some bloggers have found AdSense advertising revenue to be the monetary impetus that keeps them blogging, and may find their inability run advertising scripts like AdSense to be a deal breaker (although Wordpress.com blogs like Scobleizer demonstrate how different advertisements can be included). On the positive side, Wordpress.com developers and maintainers have had to fix far fewer bugs, the Wordpress.com community benefits from viewer abandoned or misused blogs, and consumers of Wordpress.com blogs benefit from content and not advertising and other scripts (however useful they might seem to blog authors).

No Photos

Blogger lets users upload up to 300MB of photos which is rather generous. Wordpress.com at this time does not offer any storage space for photos, but of course lets you link to photos stored elsewhere with GUI tools (and raw HTML). This might not be a concern for some with popular, free photo storage sites like ImageShack and Flickr letting users upload enough photos per month for a typical blog, however skipping one stop with Blogger blogs and uploading photos directly through the GUI is a nice option.

Categories, Tags and Pings

Wordpress.com comes with the ability to allow the content creator to define categories (that can be related in a hierarchy) to add metadata to post content. This feature is commonplace on many blogging platforms, but unfortunately remains missing in Blogger. Wordpress.com gives you the option of pinging sites like ping-O-matic and sending your tags into Technorati for display out of the box. At the time of this writing, Blogger was able to ping certain meta sites like Ping-O-Matic, but had no such tagging features out of the box. Tagging will help your blog visibility greatly. Categories help break up your types of content, making it easier for first-time visitors to see your most frequent topics.

Built-in Stats

Referrers, Top Posts, and Search Engine Terms round out the current statistics that are available to all Wordpress.com blog users. While more advanced (and expensive) web statistics programs certainly exist, having these (generally most useful) statistics within the Wordpress interface is very convenient. Wordpress also has a Beta feature (at the time of this writing) to track blog users’ Feed stats.

Summary

Pros

• Well designed themes
• Import all posts and comments from Blogger with one click
• Organization: tags and categories
• Static “Page” content can be separated from “Post” content

Cons

• No photo storage option (Blogger offers 300MB for free)
• No scripts (no Javascript Flickr feed, Digg feed, no Statcounter or Analytics stats, no AdSense ads)