I can’t tell you the number of people who tell me they migrated from Blogger (blogspot), Google’s uber popular blog platform, because of the lack of categories.
I know that Blogger has implemented some great additions to their platform in the past year. When I began blogging on Blogger there was no picture upload (you had to use Picasa’s Hello and the integration was horrible. And, if I remember correctly, at that time comments as part of a Blogger blog were new as well. I know a lot of people on Blogger who still use HaloScan comments because at the time they were blogging their Blogger blogs did not have the comment feature.
Now, the last super-duper huge feature that Blogger needs to add is a category feature. Yes I know you can use Technorati tags as categories on a Blogger blog, but frankly, that’s not ‘easy’ and it’s not good enough for reliable categories.
Blogger needs to implement this pretty quickly. I migrated from Blogger to WordPress months ago, and it was a snap (and I didn’t lose one word of content). When others realize just how easy this migration is, if Blogger isn’t up to par with other free options, they’ll begin to hemorage.
Well, they’ll still have the sploggers…
I also migrated two months ago. Many features Blogger is lack of, wp has.
The extensibility of wp makes it now the most popular blogging software in use worldwide.
I suggest u install “subscribe for comments” plugin so that whenever there is any new comment, the subscriber will be notified.
Maybe a Tag Cloud will help?
http://jeremiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com/2006/05/old-men-dont-get-tag-clouds.html
I probably do need to install that plugin. I’ll see if I can find it.
I hope that Blogger sees that categories are a necessity. Sure, you can use a tag cloud, technorati tags, etc. to assist your users, but you shouldn’t have to add that feature to your blog, it should come standard…
That’s really my beef. Not that it’s not doable, but it shouldn’t fall on the blog owner to develop the basic parts of the site. A ‘blog platform’ should include categories as they include comments, auto ping (blogger added that last year too), etc.
I agree – Blogger NEEDS categories (I still have one Blogger blog too).
As to migrating to other platforms – possible, but you WILL lose your links. That is “incoming links,” links from other sites to yours. That’s because the format for permalinks various depending on the blogging software. Maybe they is a way around this I haven’t figured out yet?
Splogs? No just Blogger — that’s just their favorite pasture 🙂
Ted, I had no idea that was the case. I probably would not have migrated had I known that.
Oh well, I’m glad I did migrate, so I guess it’s best I didn’t know… Agree on the slogspot domain. It’s a shame though. Blogger was once a hot property.
Blogger.com doesn’t seem that bad to me. I just started blogging about 7 months ago. I suppose everyone who is new to bloggin gets on blogger.com. They are improving, yet I’m hearing a lot about wordpress. It’s so overwhelming when you are new to this information. I liked the post and look forward to reading more blogs and hearing more podcasts from this site. 🙂
Love, peace and empathy
Terry J. Snipes
http://www.writingup.com/blog/terry_snipes
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