Thursday, November 1, 2012

The inevitable shift from Wordpress to Blogger


My first  tryst with blogging started around 2003-2004 when I was a student in Hyderabad.Back then, the only blogging tool which I knew was blogger.com .This was due to the varied services which a single Google id would give . To be frank I had no idea what a blog was all about . My daily dose of news from The Hindu was one the reasons behind my blogging début.

One fine afternoon in 2005, I went to a cybercafé along with a friend and opened  a blogger account. What I wrote online on that day must be crap by blogging standards. But I was  young and was not matured enough to understand what a blog would really mean to the readers. Fast forward to 2008 - this was when I delved into the world of blogging in a serious way. Word Press has been a great publishing platform for my blog . In the 3 years I used it -  I liked the very first theme which was automatically selected. Nice clean design and features like word proofing kept me glued to Word Press for some time. But as time progressed and the hit rate increased a lot about certain articles in the blog, I was very keen to learn about reader information. Since some articles like the Ogilvy Internship and Ubuntu experience on the IdeaPad netbook were among the highest traffic sources.



In the meantime I also realized that widget support in Wordpress.com was pathetic. Since I would expect most of them to have real time information and this in turn would mean support for java script ,I was wondering if other platforms should have been  adapted in order to incorporate live content of mine. For example, I’ve been using paper.li to aggregate news information about my favorite stuff on the internet and share it with my friends on twitter. Wordpress.com would not support their respective widget.
For ages I have tried to use an alternative HTML tracking based metrics service -  since Google Analytics was also not supported. For me using a a single open web id to access all of my content  on the web was an easy way of managing all of my social platforms



Unfortunately Word Press would not provide an  in depth analytics platform to deal with metrics and outreach and this lead me to evaluate and use certain third party tools . Going up was the only which I found. But this would not give me the  rich dashboard and intuitive UI as analytics would do so I seriously began to think about jumping the ship to Blogger. Keen to check what blogger was providing I signed into the service after a very long time and much to my surprise the whole thing had changed a lot. There were more options for customized layouts and the new Dynamic appearance layout was definitely a stealer. All of these factors combined, I brought  a page redirect option and  embraced Blogger again .This is where I began my journey here and this is where it would continue forever!  

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