In retrospective, choosing Blogger as the blogging platform of my choice was a terrible idea.
I remember googling something like “Blogger vs WordPress” when first looking for a suitable platform. That taught me that there are actually two “things” known as WordPress: a website (WordPress.com), which provides up and running blogs and websites (many strings attached), and a program (WordPress.org), which assists professional web designers with the creation and organization of their websites.
The WordPress.org program is obviously just that one free program. You have to take care of publishing and hosting your website(s) yourself.
The creation of a WordPress.com account is free of charge along with the handful of templates you can choose from for your new blog. Some areas of these templates are un-editable by the user and are used by WordPress.com for ads (you have no control over what’s being advertised). Anything beyond that will cost you. At some point probably more than it would have when doing the whole thing by yourself using WordPress.org.
Blogger, on the other hand, is part of Google. If you have a Google account (a @gmail.com email address), you already have a blogger account. With a blog at Blogger, you have almost 100% control over the content of your blog, and, if you chose to remove all “social annoyances” as well as not opt in to Google’s Adsense (earn money by allowing areas of your blog to be used by Google to provide visitors with interest-based ads) your blog is almost tracker-free (Google’s own trackers excluded).
Being a lazy, ad-hating, privacy concerned individual, I thought that Blogger would be a good choice. I thought wrong…
The Webz
The internet is not perfect. As a matter of fact it was never designed to be able to do the things it can do now. The plan was that people (scientists) would use it to send each other their papers. For those papers to be not just continuously flowing text, they were able to add certain signs (aka Markups) to sections of their paper they wanted to look different. Like making text bold, underline a sentence or even adding a line break. These signs are normal characters, but the program on the receiving side (aka a web browser) uses them to format the paper the way it was intended to by the writer.Nowadays things got very complicated. Technological advancements and individualism have taken over and turned the web into a circus. A circus on a unicycle. We’re are trying to counter it by creating rules (aka standards) on how to efficiently implement new things, but things are developing too rapidly. People don’t have the time to get together and figure it out because time is money, and because they won’t agree anyway. So believe it or not, the web you’re using every day is (a) a nightmare for your web browser (b) slower than it can be, and; (c) not backwards compatible (as in: newer browsers can’t “render” older websites and vice versa).
This doesn’t sound very shocking at first. But you have to think on a large scale. Like how come that website xyz doesn’t open properly in Microsoft Edge, but does in Google Chrome? Or why do all websites created before [insert year here] look “weird”? Many of our favorite websites will look “weird” in the future too. With the way the internet is set up, there won’t be an end to this.
But then why should we care? That’s someone else’s job. And that someone is most likely getting paid to care.
I thought the same until I realized that the blogging platform I choose is, at the cost of their users, already preparing for the inevitable epic battle it’s going to have against this ancient deformity we call the World Wide Web.
Yet another Markup Language
People use a language called the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to make old systems talk to new ones (or new systems talk to old ones?). It also allows you to structure and format data in a database-like manner, so that it can be queried and sorted later easier and faster. Those certainly aren’t the only things XML can do for you, but to keep things simple, let’s not worry about the others for now.Blogger hosts thousands of blogs and is committed to make them available and properly “renderable” by all browsers well into the future. In order to do that it cannot rely on the fragile and ever-changing web standards. Instead it nests the HTML templates of every blog inside XML markups, which their own systems can then skew and distort as it sees fit.
Pretty good idea actually. This way they can fix or update things with a few keystrokes, and without anyone ever noticing.
The downside of it is that you’ll have a hard time editing the main template of your blog.
If your HTML/CSS/XML knowledge is (very) basic and/or you rely on WYSIWYG software, you’re screwed. No WYSIWYG software is able to help you with the layout of your blog. The one that comes the closest is Artisteer. But believe me, it’s awful.
So if you're like me and rely on WYSIWYG software, and don’t want to or can’t go through dozens of pages of blogger documentation and learn a couple more web-oriented programming languages and XML, you have to blog using a default (and ugly) template. Or pay someone to design the layout for you. Which brings us back to WordPress.
