From Blogger to Wordpress to Tumblr to Wordpress(.com) to Wordpress(.org) to Weebly to Blogger

Why I Came Back to Blogger

by Wendy Murray

If anyone has been able to follow my blogging these past few months you are a devoted reader and I salute you. It has been a long rough road trying to find the suitable platform for my eMagazine and social media engine of Ecco Qua Press. I've tried every significant blogging platform out there, groping, clawing, thrashing, exporting, importing, guffawing and finally giving up only to return to where I started: Blogger. In this post I tell only the narrative of the misadventure without the technical nuances, since these are easily accessible elsewhere on the web by others more skilled than I at explaining them.

Blogger to Wordpress

My blog career started at Blogger because that is where every first-time blogger with little experience tends to gravitate. Over time I had no significant bad experiences with Blogger -- the presence of that annoying icon "b" in the upper corner was as bad as it got-- but I felt I needed to ramp up the blog and give it a sharper look with more engine power since I was moving toward making the blog a source of income. (What I mean by "engine power" I can't say. I simply felt that Blogger was provincial and too easy. My mistake.)  I went to Wordpress.

Working with Wordpress felt like pruning rose bushes without gloves, or enduring some other excruciating illogical -- and technical-- enterprise that caused great pain, while pushing on in the hope of a pay-off that I never enjoyed. It's a tough platform for someone like me--menus, pages, plug-ins, widgets -- who is a tweaker and wants control (at least the semblance of control) over the appearance, but who reads html only at an elementary self-taught level. To really benefit from Wordpress, you need a tech person, which costs money. If money is an issue, as it is for me, best to avoid this minefield. It was not user-friendly and, even when you figured it out, you were very limited in what you could do to customize it without spending money.

Wordpress to Tumblr

I had heard wonderful things about Tumblr: it's clean, simple, easy. So I gave it try. My mistake early on was that, back in the day, I had tried Tumblr under another blog and thus, with this blog, simply added a second Tumblr blog to the already-existing account. I realized, again too late, that this new second blog was the "secondary" Tumblr blog, which meant it had many restrictions placed upon it in deference to the primary blog. (What you can't do with a Tumblr secondary blog can be seen here.) As for issues unrelated to secondary blogs, Tumblr was beautiful and smart and, of all the platforms I tried, I liked the look of it the best. Still, I tripped up with it. It is designed for Smartphone posting and gets a little more complicated if you are developing content. I ended this blog with regret because I really liked the way it looked. Too bad it included prohibitive roadblocks. These little quirks and unpleasant surprises took their toll. 

Tumblr to Wordpress.com
Back to Wordpress, whose obstacles, after the Tumblr confusion, I thought could be overcome with the knowledge I'd gained. I was wrong. At this stage I was well into the process before discovering bitterly the significant fact that Wordpress.com is an altogether different arrangement than Wordpress.org and is much more limited. Unless you start paying littles bits of money here and there (such as for a wider choice of fonts and to remove Wordpress.com's ads that will automatically be imposed in your space), which add up, Wordpress.com is a very limited platform if you are trying to benefit from its being "free" while at the same time wanting your site to look "professional." The technical nuances between them are easily readable here.

Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org

Fortunately for me, I was already in possession of a Wordpress.org account, which hosted the web site for Ecco Qua Press. Eureka! I will simply figure out a way to include the eMagazine as part of that larger site and my problems will be solved! I tried -- and succeeded, surprisingly, in importing the blog to the larger web site. But, alas, I did things that carried results that I didn't know how to undo and, for all intents and purposes, the rest of the site became subsumed by the blog, which I tried to live with but felt unsettled about. I needed tech help -- but had no money to pay someone. I concluded with exasperation that if this arrangement (meaning blog curation) was going to work, I had to be able to control the environment, while managing it had to be sufficiently painless that I could update blog posts regularly with minimal exasperation and without technical intervention.

Wordpress.org to Weebly

I mounted a final attempt to find another way. A quick web search showed me there are several other blogging/ web platforms out there apart from the standard fare such as I had been working with. I set up a Weebly account just like that and -- by this point was so adept at "building"-- put a blog together in no time. The problem came when I wanted to preview what I had done before publishing it. What? No, you can't preview your post on Weebly. Why any designers of a web platform would allow this to be a feature is beyond me. Not previewing your post is equivalent to publishing a book or magazine without proofreading.  I wasted little time. Good-bye, Weebly.

Hello, Blogger.

I defy anyone to take a look at the blog and determine instantly, based upon the look and feel of it, that it is a "blogger" blog. It's clean, workable, accessible and free. I control the environment and do not have to contend with hidden costs. It is part of the Google universe (which may or may not be a plus), so easily integrated into other Google apparatus and accounts. Best of all, Blogger has introduced the option to do away with that annoying "b." Okay, the URL includes "blogspot"and that bugs me. I feel cheap. But until I make a million dollars and can pay a tech person for a new system with bells and whistles, it is a small price to pay.