Back to chocolatemilkforbreakfast.blogspot.com for now. I let the custom domain lapse.

Blogger vs Wordpress - battle of the free blogging sites

Both blogger & wordpress.com are free (not self hosted wordpress.org) but what else do you need to consider when making you're choice of which platform to go with? I've not been using blogger for that long so these are mostly first impressions (which I may edit or add to over time) but for now everything is compared to wordpress.com (so the advantages below are where WP falls short).


Advantages of Blogger:

• Free repointing to your own domain if you have one. With wordpress, unless you pay, you are stuck with .wordpress.com on the end of your site name. With blogger you can dump the .blogspot.com. 
• No Ads.
• Ads if you want them. This is a double point in the favour of blogger. Wordpress.com funds itself on its ads so you are not allowed any of your own or any affiliate links. Blogger hooks directly into Google Adsense and you are allowed to set other ads & affiliates - or have none if you want a cleaner look.
• Better SEO? This one is subjective it just seems I get more hits on my blogger site even though its new that I would on a new Wordpress site.
• Add your own widgets. At least I think you can. You can certainly run embedded scripts in text boxes which is a no-non on WP.
• You can add your own commenting system of choice e.g. Disqus. This is a pro and a con - see below for the disadvantage.

Disadvantages of Blogger:

• Generally just not as user friendly to edit posts on blogger.
• No draft saving history. Have you ever been half way through a blog post and accidentally wiped it or something happens to ruin it, the autosave has kicked in and now you can't get back to where you were? Well its happened to me more often than I'd like. Wordpress.com has a handy feature where you can go back to an earlier draft. Blogger does not.
• Mobile blogging with Blogger? Might as well forget it. The wordpress app it great but the blogger one is very very basic. You cannot even edit the HTML of the post to work around how basic it is. 
• I might just be missing it, but I cannot seem to find the media library on blogger. You can certainly upload images to the blogposts and see them when you want to enter one you've previously uploaded them into a post but how can you get there and search and maintain them? This is easy on wordpress.
• When adding a link, there is no way to pick from your existing posts, if I want to refer back to a post I made I have to manually go and find the link in another browser tab and then treat it as any other. 
• Better templates on wordpress. Its just my opinion but there seemed to be many many more to choose from on WP (and better more up-to-date designs) and the choices on Blogger seem somewhat limited.
• Weirdly no hierarchical way to organise things. In wordpress you have tags and categories. In blogger you only have labels (which are like tags).
• Less built in widgets to choose from. This follows on from the pro point above where you can add your own I suppose (which you cannot do on WP) but if you just want something ready made and right there, its isn't always obvious. For example a twitter box - took me a while to figure that one.
• One disadvantage which annoys me with every new post is the lack of ability to say which social networks to push this post out too, and to be able to customise the text of the message on them. For example. If I know the topic has a particular hashtag, I may wish to use it on social media but not so much in the title of the post. Plus, it pushes to Google+ (sometimes) but I'm forced to use another service (such as IFTT) to push out to other sites, which means I have to administer to it elsewhere if I want to skip a certain one going out to twitter or Facebook. 2005 wants their social interactions back please blogger.
• Again, I might be missing it, but there seems to be no way to search the blogspot community (assuming there is one, it appears from the interface that I'm blogging in a vacuum). Wordpress provide lots of ways to interact with other WP users, following, reblogging, seeing whats just been posted by other users etc. I know there are lots of good bloodspot blogs but I have no real idea of how to find them from within blogger. Once I have a link to a known blog I can add it to a reader though.
• You pretty much have to choose your own commenting system (I choose disqus but there others commentluv etc) because the blogger one is so awful. It means I have to go into another program to manage them which is annoying (and to be honest I don't really get it yet so I keep missing replying to comments straight away).

Of course there's always hosting your own as an option (probably the best option, if you have the money). You can download the Wordpress software from wordpress.org for free and run your own site on a hosted server. (which you pay for). The famous ones are bluehost and godaddy but there are many others. I had 1and1 hosting for a while but never really did anything with it, it felt like gym membership, pay yearly and feel guilty for not going. I was trying to create my own site full website, gallery and blog though, a bit ambitious at the time. You get a lot more choice with themes and widgets (because it's your own you do as you please, ads, no ads, its totally up to you). You can get hosting for  as little as £30 per year so it won't break the bank but I just wanted to get up and running in 5mins which is why I choose blogger. Another advantage of the free ones is that they will back up for you, so barring user error or doing something to get your account suspended, your blog will be there forever. With a self hosted one as soon as you stop paying they stop existing. I thought I'd start off with blogger but using my own domain name (£5 per year), this was, if/when I switched over I could take my blog with me and all external links to me would still work after the move.

Any of you blogger/wordpress.com users got anything else to add in the comments? I'd love to hear what others think.

Chitika – Make money from blogging

So who doesn't want to earn money doing something they were going to do anyway?

Everyone has heard of Google AdSense but I'd never heard of Chitika before. In fact until I started this blog I was uninformed about Ads in general because over at Wordpress.com you are not allowed to show your own ads & affiliate links (for example I had one for B&H Photo in NY which I couldn't use). The free wordpress.com is only free because they show their own ads on your blog unless you pay to have them removed (which is fair enough).You have to host your own WP site using Wordpress.org for the freedom to use ads.

Anyway, I opened my blogger account with the express intention of belong allowed to use AdSense only to realise one of the conditions is that you have to have had your blog up and running for a while before you are eligible. Doh. I've only just activated them but before I did I found these guys.

Apparently you can even use different ad networks together. You don’t need to commit to just one! For example, publishers who use both Chitika Ads and Google AdSense together have seen a 30% boost in revenue, as opposed to if they used AdSense alone (according to the Chitika blurb).

Personally I hate sites with loads of annoying ads on them, I'm sure I'm not alone too. Mainly because they clash with the look of the site and stand out too much from the content you're there to look at (especially on photo sites). Thats why I was so pleased to find Chitika because they let you customise the look of the ads to fit better with your site giving a better user experience. That way, if a visitor is actually interested in the ad link then they'll click it but if not, well its much more easily ignored if it blends in. Their ads work on the search terms relating to what you have on your site (I don't think its as a clever as AdSense but I don't have any frame of reference for that yet).
The minimum payout is just $10 via Paypal. Also, Chitika have an affiliate program – you will earn 10% of the CPC revenue that your referrals made for the first ten months that your referrals have Chitika running with free referral banners are provided (as you see from the one I've put in this post).

I don't expect the cash will flow in but every penny counts, especially if you don't have to do anything  extra to earn it ;)