I’m going to start an experiment folks. I want to know which is better, WordPress.com or Blogger. Now, hands down I prefer the WordPress dashboard, the built in stats, and the “Possibly Related Posts” that generate traffic for me. And this would probably never have come up if I hadn’t stupidly deleted my kaitnolan.wordpress.com blog when I moved to self-hosted last fall. I didn’t know I would be moving back, and WordPress has a policy that they never reuse defunct usernames, even if you can prove you were the original owner–which I think sucks. In any event, since I can no longer use kaitnolan.wordpress.com, I have the choice of keeping my current seanachi.wordpress.com account or ultimately adding something like kaitnolanbooks.wordpress.com or moving over to kaitnolan.blogspot.com. I already reserved the latter and have been using it as a landing page since at least 50% of the blogs I comment on are hosted on Blogger. The pros for Blogger are that a) kaitnolan was available as a username, b) you can change your template to anything you want and tweak CSS yourself without paying anything extra, c) it allows for flash applications, which WordPress does not.
So what’s the experiment? Well I’m going to spend the next few months maintaining blogs in BOTH locations. I’ve imported all my old posts to Blogger, and I will be cross-posting all my content at each site. Then we’ll let the statistics speak for themselves as to which is better. It’s all kind of a long term plan, and possibly I will eventually move back to self-hosted WordPress when I’m published and a household name (hey, I can dream!). Or I can just forward the domain for my wordpress blog to kaitnolan.com. But I really love that Lynn Viehl of Paperback Writer has stayed with something free all these years. So we’ll see.
In any event, I’ll keep you posted about the results of my experiment!
Update: I have NOT imported all my old wordpress posts to Blogger as apparently you can’t just upload an xml file and there seems to be no good way to convert a blog over 1 MB and still retain the original comments authors etc. If anybody knows how to do this, please let me know.