My first post on WordPress and I’m loving it!

Posted on May 19, 2007 at 10:55 pm

Holy cow!! I LOVE WORDPRESS! I can’t imagine how I lived for three months on Blogger!! And I joined up on Blogger Beta, I feel bad for anyone who had to use the original Blogger. Nah, I won’t rag on Blogger, it’s a great platform if you are just starting a blog or you’re blogging for fun and don’t care about having a large readership.

But if you’re getting serious about blogging, then you must switch to WordPress! WordPress has so many features that you can’t even think about having in Blogger! This, of course, is through the myriad of plug-ins that are available for WordPress. The “widgets” on the Blogger site itself are the only ones you can use in your blog. Currently, I think there are only 10 or 11 of them. Compare that to hundred’s of WordPress plugins!

And let me tell you that the WordPress plugins are AWSEOME! In about two days, I downloaded at least 15 plug-ins to place links to automatically share my post on the main social networks, create a Top 10 most popular posts, show the most recent comments on my blog, show 5 related posts to a single post automatically, add meta tags to each post page, block spam comments on the blog, convert my WordPress default feed to FeedBurner, automatically generate a Google sitemap, create SEO friendly permalinks for blog posts, and automatically backup my WordPress blog weekly! That’s a lot of stuff and it only took 2 days!

On top of that all, you get your own custom domain name and full control over things such as your .htaccess and robots.txt files. These are extremely useful for doing things such as URL redirects (from online-tech-tips.com to www.online-tech-tips.com) or blocking the Googlebot and other search engines from getting to a single post in 10 different ways. For example, in Blogger there is no way to stop Google from indexing your archive pages, feeds, and comments in addition to your original post. This means that a lot of your site ends up in the supplemental index and that’s never good.

On a side note though, moving from Blogger to WordPress is not super easy and definitely takes a good amount of time and research. For example, it’s quite easy to import your Blogger posts into Wordpress, but what do you do then? Do you simply delete your Blogger blog or do you redirect your old blog to your new blog? Each way has it’s advantages and disadvantages and should be considered carefully before hastily switching over, especially if your blog is already ranking well in Google and has a decent PageRank value.

Actually, after I’m done switching to completely to WordPress, I’m going to write up a nice long post on how I went about doing it and if I was able to save my PR and traffic or not!