Geek Rant: WordPress vs Blogger

Our blogs have been on the move in the past year or so as we try to find something that works well for us.

Originally our blogs were self-hosted using BlogCFC. As ColdFusion programmers, it was great. But as our interests changed from programming to other things, the upkeep became cumbersome and we moved our blogs (post by post) over to Blogger.

Blogger served its purpose at the time - we were going to downgrade our server at home since neither of us were doing much site development. We wanted to simply upkeep of our in-house server as much as possible so using hosted blogs on Blogger seemed like the thing to do. The downside (for us) is that having multiple Google logins means opening separate browser instances every time you need to tend to this blog or that. As a result, I tend to ignore the comment notifications when I see they are spam, even though I know I should go clean them up. Add a couple of posts that are for some reason particularly attractive to spammers and now I have one post with 54 comments that need to be deleted. And deleting a single comment in Blogger takes 4 clicks. Also, if anything ever happens to Blogger, all of our content is gone unless we remember to manually back it up.

So bring on WordPress. We host our own WordPress blogs and while I don't know a whole lot about the language it's written in (PHP), I've picked up enough to make the few changes I want to see. And that spam deletion? Once you're logged into the admin dashboard, it's one click per message. Plus all of our entries are stored in our own database that is backed up nightly. The main downside is that if our server is down for some reason, so are our sites.

This blog is already on WordPress. I'm working on moving Mike's now. Next will be The Rogans. It will take less time to set up blogs and import than to delete all that spam on Blogger.