The Experiment: WP wins, I think

So I find myself gravitating away from blogger.

I write all of my posts in Word Press, then copy/paste over to blogger -if I remember. So far I haven't forgotten one, but I feel like it's just a matter of time before I forget about it all together.

On the one hand, it makes me sad, cause that feels like wasting space, but on the other hand, I'm kinda happy to know that I have a true preference. I knew my knee jerk reaction to blogger was just from being overwhelmed by all the options on Word Press, and I'm happy to see that I didn't let myself give up on WP just because it was daunting at first.

I do still wanna do something with my blogger, but I'm not sure what. Suggestions?

The Experiment: On Vacation

Alright, it's been a while since I've done a comparison piece, so here we go.

I took most of the past two weeks off from work, from blogging, from everything. No one is really surprised, I'm sure. Today's comparison is a little thing, but I think in the long run it's pretty important to the success of a blog - how often the author thinks about it.

I haven't thought about my blogger once in all this vacation time. Once I cued up the posts for both sites, I stopped thinking about blogger and hadn't thought about it again until writing my New Year's post and realizing I'd need to copy/paste it to both locations.

Without my word press blog, this whole project probably would have died.

My WP keep sending me little emails about this or that post being liked (Thanks, everyone! I'm glad you liked it!), or having new followers (Hello!), and while I didn't have enough Internet access to check anything (home is in backwoods Ohio), knowing that it was there, making people happy or think or simply click like because they were compelled to do so by little green aliens - it made a difference. It kept me thinking about what I wanted to in January, when NaNo recap would be over. It made me wonder what my new followers were like, if I'd another great blog I'd like to follow, made me excited to catch up on the ones I'm following now.

I guess what I'm saying is Word Press left me with a better sense of community.

I don't know if that's because my G+ is mostly empty, or if WP is just easier to set things up in, or purely baseless, but in keeping me feeling connected, this round goes to Word Press.

The Experiment: Messing around with the app

It's been a minute since I've played with the iPhone app, so I thought I'd give it another shot. 

So far, it's way simple, almost like composing an email or text. I can add a photo or play with bold and italics but that's all that's different, really. I'll mess around with the labels and stuff, but I don't see that there's too much to explore with the app.

[edited to add] Yeah, this is pretty much like an unlimited character version of twitter. Here's my location, a selfie, and I can say all I want about it. I can save as a draft or publish later, so I do like the idea of using this to make notes on the go about things I wanna blog about later, but that's about it. 

The Experiment: Pretty well adjusted

I've been moving pretty steadily back and forth between Word Press and Blogger now. I just work in whichever I happen to pull up first, and copy paste over to the other. I think I'm growing fonder of WP's categorizing/tagging function, but I can't honestly say why. Just another feelings thing.

I do have to say that I like how I'm already enjoying a fair amount of community interaction on WP, not so much on Blogger, and I'm really curious as to why. Anywhere that I've posted about the blog project, I've been sure to post links to both sites, but I haven't really had an input here on blogger. I'm really curious as to why, since they're basically the same blog. One assumes it's the platform, but honestly, I have no idea.

The Experiment: Mobile Apps

Yesterday, I was out and about all day, so I had to rely completely on my mobile apps to keep up with the experiment.

I can't say I was too impressed with Bloggers.

It stayed true to the simplified format that won me over before, but the app is too simple. As far as I could tell, all you can do from it is read posts and write posts. I'd not a bad app, exactly, but I didn't feel like I was really using a mobile extension of Blogger. It was more for like, I don't, emergency blogging? Like you're out and about and simply have to post this photo or this comment - much more like Twitter for your blog, in my opinion. I wanted my stats, mostly (oh vanity) but aside from that, the four large icons that are my only choices just didn't seem like enough.

This round goes to Word Press, Blogger. Sorry.

[edit to add: I'm using an iPhone 4, if anyone was curious.]

The Experiment: Adding Photos

Fortunately, that little bout of silliness gave me something a little more serious to write about. It's not much, and it's not as relevant to a web serial, but it might come up,and it is part of my experiences, so why not.

Adding photos in blogger was SUPER easy. Formatting them within my post was also, super, super easy. I'm not too surprised by this, given that this is a blogging platform, so a lot of people probably use it to post photo heavy content, but seriously, so easy. Sizing, picture location relative to text, and each other, the uploading itself, all beyond easy peasy. Peasey? Who knows?

At any rate, should your web serial ever need to include pictures (say, a character sketch, an important symbol, a map), it's no problem on blogger. In fact, it's so easy, I may find myself throwing random David Tennant bones out there occasionally, just to inspire me. :)

"You're being productive out there, right?"

The Experiment: This round goes to Word Press

A completely just for fun, silly thing.

Word Press has a little box in the upper left hand corner that tells me this is my fifth, sixth, seventh post, and I just looked up and realized I'd hit 11. So, I dropped some gratuitous Doctor Who.

Rather than going back and editing my 10th and 11th posts here (because while the two mirror each other somewhat, both blogs are not perfect matches) I'll just give you a double doctor whammy in this one off, no other point to it post.

Happy (belated) 10th and 11th posts everyone!

-R

The Experiment: Building a Buffer

This entry is a little less about blogger vs word press and a little more about using blogs for web serials 
making myself slow down sometimes
using blogs for web serials.

The Experiment: Drafting and Scheduling

I almost forgot to even make this post, since it was sooo easy to do here on blogger. Also pretty intuitive on word press, but blogger just seems so much more streamlined. Honestly, there's probably equal amounts going on on both pages, but I just seem to "get" blogger better. We'll see how that goes over time.

[Edited to add]

Yup, even saves my draft pretty darned well.

Honestly, the more I'm using both of them, and less afraid I am of word press, the more they seem pretty much the same. I'm sure I'll find more differences as I get into the gritty complicated bits, but for now, I think it's just a matter of preference. Both are fair easy to use, both are fairly customizable, so it's whichever one you grok, I guess.

The Experiment: Circle of Blog

The Experiment - Oops

The Experiment

Part of what I want to do with this blog is experiment with Blogger vs. Word Press. I've heard good things about both, and want to just dabble around and see what I do and don't like about each.

The idea is to more or less have both blogs mirror each other, which the only real differences being where I explore each platform. So the "Writes" content will be the same, but anything tagged as "The Experiment" will be all about my experience with the platform directly. Less about writing, more about publishing.

So, for anyone curious about my adventures in self-publishing, follow along here and at http://raevenlywrites.wordpress.com/

I'll try to talk mostly about blogger here, and mostly about word press there, but I won't flat avoid mentioning them on each other because sometimes direct comparisons are what I'm doing, but I'll keep it to a minimum.

-R
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First thoughts