Blogger Only Goes So Far

Blogger has served this site well as it’s developed, as I explained some time ago. It is becoming more noticeable to me, however, the limitations of the Blogger engine, and I think it’s getting to the stage where a migration to WordPress is necessary.

There are a couple of reasons why I believe that Blogger, while not deserving of much of the criticism it gets, is no longer appropriate.

Unprofessional commenting

Most of the time when you click on the comment button on a blog you open up a small form on the same page. This form is styled to correspond to the rest of the site and incorporates fully into the blog post page. It also includes features such as Gravatar to give it a more polished look and allow commenters to develop their online identity. And of course the default data provides commenters with an automatic linkback to their site.

The Blogger commenting system doesn’t allow for this. While the rest of the blog is strongly skinned to fit in with the overall site look and feel seamlessly, commenting opens up a new window with Blogger themed commenting. This both jars with the overall look and feel of the site and defaults to a commenter’s Blogger profile for user information. This is far less practical for developing linkbacks.

Impractical coding considerations

This blog page is heavily skinned and looks consistent with the rest of the site. But it effectively exists as a seperate entity, the Blogger template, that is skinned and hacked to look the same. This is fair enough, but it has limitations.

Because of the way that Blogger deals with permalinks and labels, the template used requires absolute linking rather than relative. i.e. I cannot use:

&ltlink rel=”stylesheet” href=”stylesheets/foe_global.css” /%gt

within the blog pages, because while this works OK for the main blog.aspx page (which is in the root directory) it doesn’t work for permalinks and labels which are placed in seperate directories. And neither document relative or root relative linking seems to work.

The Blogger template is also effectively an html page (even though I have it as an aspx extension). So I can’t use the web controls or other .net and c# functionality that I use elsewhere to make the site easier to administer and control. And in addition I have to use too much HTML coding internally in the blog posts to ensure adherence to CSS classes and positioning.

Inconsistent filetypes

The Fog of Eternity site is developed with .net, and the file extensions are .aspx. Blogger creates .html pages for its permalinks. This is not a major issue in practicality, but looks unprofessional.

Server and FTP issues

By blog is hosted on my own server, in that Blogger will upload the various files and folders to Fog of Eternity. But that’s a bit of a fudge situation. It disallows many of the plugins that are available for Blogger, and the database that the blog details are stored on is inaccessible as it remains on the Blogger page and only uploads static file content to the website.

Uploading is also a pain, and increasingly slow when the blog grows in size and larger number of files are uploading. This is particularly an issue when large scale uploads of the full blog are required or similar largescale changes.

So, what’s next?

Blogger is still a resonable tool for many blogs, but I’m not sure it has the scalability and wider functionality that’s becoming necessary for Fog of Eternity.

As a result, over the next few days and weeks I’m working on learning the ins and outs of WordPress with a view to migrating the whole Fog of Eternity to that. It requires preparation in a number of areas, including consideration for retaining PageRank and permalinks, gaining a deeper understanding of PHP (as it will mean the site moving away from a .NET basis), and ensuring effective skinning and layout.

All of these are issues I’ll talk about as they occur and hope to provide some tutorials on some of the notable aspects of a switchover.