Blogger.Com Platform vs WordPress - First Impressions by WordPress Guru

The Blogger Platform, First Impression By WordPress User

I recently visited a cool blog, and did the thing I always do when I find a cool blog, I viewed the source and tried to figure out what the owner used to create it.

Oh, who am I? My name is Rich, and I'm the owner of the DisplacedGuy PowerBuilder, .NET, Adsense Income & Blogging for Cash Bog, among others.

When looking at the source code it appeared the blog was made via blogger.com. This didn't make sense to me because the theme was really high-tech and impressive. I always believed that using a cloud based solution meant giving up some usability features in the user interface. Well, it is possible that my assumption was way off.

First Impression, Blogger Is Fun To Use

The first thing I noticed about blogger.com, is that it felt like I was using a real application and not using a clunky web app. The second thing I noticed is that the interface was robust, modern, and very fast. Not what I expected at all for a web application.

Let's try adding some media

Well it wasn't any different than using WordPress. 

Let's try using some text formatting features

I went back and added some bold text, color and basic formatting features. Some notable differences are that WordPress has H1, H2, H3, etc. tags and Blogger has Heading, Subheading, etc. settings which are more intuitive.

Impressive: One notable cool feature was the link menu-item. I highlighted blogger.com and expected to see a dialog box like in WordPress. To my surprise blogger.com turned to a link instantly with no questions asked, very cool.

Cool: Another cool feature was the ability to cut and past formatted text and have the formatting remain. I cut the "Impressive" text after it was colored light blue and pasted it to a different location. Viola, the color formatting followed in the paste, like you'd expect unlike WordPress. Hmm.. now why was I using WordPress?

Image manipulation coolness: I liked the way that the user interface works for aligning and sizing the images, it worked without a modal dialog box popping up. I never realized how much I hate modal dialog boxes until I saw the way blogger.com works.

This is a pill - caption test

Now I wouldn't normally write an article using a rainbow of colors but this is unique in that I am testing out all the features and going overboard.

Other differences:

• Labels in blogger appear to be analogous to tags in WordPress. No biggie here just something different. 
• The blogger platform has a location setting for which I am not sure what it does.
• The blogger platform lets you choose to display HTML literally in cases where you are showing examples of code, like this: <div align='center'>this is my test div</div> and this will not get interpreted as HTML-- I think anyway.
• Blogger has an option for making line breaks be enter or using the <br> tag (note it is shown literally here)

For now this is the end of my simple test of blogger.com. It was a quick ten minute test but was cool enough that I may do a full write up on the differences because I think there is a lot to be learned from using the user interface here. 

Take care,

Rich