Pep's Top Blog

After I decided to write this English Blog, I have to choose a BSP first.
In fact, I needn’t make my choice when I was writing Blog in China.

Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Blog.com, LiveJournal.com, Xanga.com, none of them were options for me.
Not that their services were bad (they all provide nice services), but they were blocked by Chinese government or on the way to be blocked.
If you don’t know how and why the evil government does that, please referral this Wiki page.

Well, finally I came to the free world, and have to make the sweet choice.

Blogger, WordPress or hosting Blog on my own server?
After some searching and attempts, I want to share some experience to you.

Blogger.com

Blogger is serviced by Google, the biggest internet company.

Advantages:

• Really easy to use, especially to beginners.
• Needn’t extra search engine optimization, the robots.txt and sitemap is auto-generated.
• Friendly to Google, it only takes 6 minutes for Google to include and index my new Blog post.
• You can easily add adsense on your Blog and make a few cents.

Disadvantages:

• Can’t create categories, that means you can only organize your content by labels.
• Not enough plugins, although many features can be hacked, such as related post, but almost all hacks are depended on AJAX, which is not friendly to search engine.
• Some annoying bugs, I wasted several hours when I was creating this Blog in Blogger.com. I will write another post to explain it detailly.

WordPress.com

WordPress is known as its famous open source php blogging software.

Advantages:

• Categories, you can create categories and organize your content by sub-topics, tags. Related posts are not generated by javascript, so it’s better to search engine than Blogger’s.
• Ping, in WordPress, you can ping many Blog directories.
• Integrated stats system, with Blogger, you must sign up a Google analytics or any other third party tracker scripts and install it manually.

Disadvantages:

• Free users can’t add their own domain names, you must upgrade to premium user first, however, this feature is free in Blogger.
• Themes and style, although WordPress’s themes are more beautiful than Blogger’s, you cannot create your own theme, you have to pay first, then you can edit the CSS.

How about installing WordPress on your own server?

If you are familiar with PHP and MySql, it’s a great idea. You can modify the source codes, install or create any plugins you want.
But if you are not a technical man, I suggest you choosing a BSP.

My counsel is you’d better have your own domain name even if you are using a free Blog service.
If one day you feel tired of your BSP, you can choose another one or host Blog yourself.
The good news is, you needn’t change your Blog URL, won’t lose your site’s page rank and your readers, the most important people.