Avoiding Disaster

Some people close to me know that I was somewhat annoyed with Blogger while creating my recent post on HDR photography at Algonquin.  It seemed unnecessarily difficult to position the pics within the tiny blog frame, which I mostly circumvented by editing the HTML directly, which worked out but not as well as I would have liked.  After very briefly looking through the various post settings on the site, I decided that the non-flexible frame width was to blame, because the pics were taking up almost the entire column.

My initial solution was to move the whole thing to Wordpress, and try the post over again more or less from scratch.  I did try that, but ran into the same problem of the pics being too big, the text not going where I want and the frame being too narrow.

This left me with two options: either to continue blogging sporadically on Blogger, or to leave the site behind and continue into the Wordpress world.  Given that I was going to encounter the same difficulties with image posting on either site, it was a matter of figuring out which site's other features I like better.  Although I certainly can't cover a comprehensive review of both sides in the small time that I have (limited by my attention span, honestly), I did come up with three things that made my decision a rather easy one.

The first is familiarity.  Of course, I'm far more familiar with Blogger than with Wordpress, having just opened my Wordpress account.  On Blogger, I know where things are and how to get done what I want to get done, or at least as much as possible.

Second, although I didn't explore very much what features and add-ons are available over at Wordpress, I did spend a fair bit of time way back when (three months ago?) figuring out what was available here at Blogger, and I like the arrangement that I have.  I also have more or less of an action plan for customizing the site with my own colours and graphics at some point, whenever I finally get around to it.

Third, and most important for me, is followers.  Yes, I currently have three followers, all good friends of mine in the offline world, so this is sort of a moot point.  Except that I also follow their blogs, and they all blog with Blogger.  All of this would have been no problem, except that after some invested searching, I could not find the section of the Wordpress dashboard that would let me follow blogs from any site that wasn't a Wordpress site!  To me, that's just stupid.  With Blogger I can follow any website with a feed.

The decision was mostly made up at this point, but two more things happened that definitely cemented my decision.  One, my long-time good friend who has been embarking on the early stages of a literary career finally got around to starting his own blog, which even he admits everyone was advising him to do.  Since I'm obviously going to support his endeavour into the blogosphere (is that still a thing?) I am going to both follow and promote his blog, Speculation and Skepticism, as much as possible.  Since it appears Wordpress won't allow me to follow his blog, I'm sticking with Blogger.

The other random thing that happened just a few minutes ago is I realized that I can edit the HTML of the blog template and just make the post display column wider.  Which solved the initial problem which was causing me to consider Wordpress in the first place.  I'm sort of embarassed that I didn't think of that a week ago.

w00t