Trying different blog hosts

I will not be blogging here anymore.

I am a very casual blogger. Although I am getting better at writing and publishing posts at a more frequent pace, I am not generating great-quality work that entice people to view my posts. Therefore, in order to get people to view my posts, I have been bouncing around between various blog hosts. My idea was that eventually I would find a community at that host, who would be friendly enough to read and provide feedback and the host would give me enough freedom to customize my site.

The two best hosts that I like the most are Blogger and WordPress.com. Before joining either of these hosts, I did a lot of online reading. Many people have already tried the two, listing out numerous pros and cons of each. In the end, these reviews could not convince me of which I should go to. Sooo, I tried both. It was both fun and frustrating trying to use each system. Here is what I have found. (Note: if you are looking for a list of pros and cons, please go to another blog whose author has done a much better job. I am just giving an anecdote of my attempts of blogging.)

I started on WordPress.com because it seemed the easiest and most comprehensive system for being free. It was interesting trying theme after theme in an effort to create a blog site that matched the topics. After blogging for a few months, I got too frustrated with all the work that was needed in order to have the format and spacing that I wanted in each post. In hindsight, I should have been typing my posts in the HTML view rather than starting in the Visual view and switching to HTML when I wanted a specific format. With a huff, I pulled everything off the site, deleted it, and started on Blogger.

Like anything new, I had a grand time playing around with it. I found a background that, in my opinion, matched the theme of my blog. It was also easier to write in my desired format since converting between plaintext and HTML was better in Blogger. I felt like this was the place I would stay permanently unless I became a professional blogger. Another couple months went by, I was still publishing posts at infrequent intervals, but I noticed some key differences that made me wonder if it was time to a different host.

On Wordpress.com, I got feedback from people who found my posts interesting. On Blogger.com, I never got any feedback. The statistics on when I posted, which part of the blog was viewed, etc. were a lot better in Wordpress.com than Blogger. In fact, I discovered that practically all of my views on Blogger were from completely random sources. Recently, I did a little searching and learned that these referrers were mostly scammer sites! That was a depressing....

Another big difference I found was trying to browse other people's blogs. Despite all my efforts and questions, I could not find a quick way to search posts in a specific topic. I had to literally Google search the keyword with the word "blogspot" in order to find a fellow blogger on Blogger. On Wordpress.com, there is a simple search bar in the Reader section that gives me the most recent WordPress.com posts with the word I am looking for.

Feeling lonely, I tried to see if there were any other blog hosts I could try. The reviews piqued my interest in WordPress.com and I decided to try it one more time. With my previous experience, I had an easier time getting posts in and formatted.

I was lucky enough to get the same url names on both Blogger and Wordpress.com. Since both blogs had very similar content, I decided to satisfy my curiosity about whether or not either blog would appear in a Google search. Oddly enough, the Wordpress.com blog showed up before the Blogger one. How weird is that??!! Blogger was purchased by Google, so I thought it was more likely to appear than the WordPress.com one.

With this new piece of information, I am more inclined to transfer all my posts back onto WordPress.com. However, unlike my previous transition, I am thinking of leaving my posts on Blogger rather than taking them off. This would give people in the future a chance to see how far I got on Blogger before switching out. The only problem would be if Google discovers the copied content and chooses to remove everything.

To you, who discovered this post, do you think it is a good idea to switch back to WordPress.com?
If you are curious as to where I am now, click here.