Hello WP Tavern

[Ileane]

Hi, I'm Ileane.

For the past year I was blogging on Wordpress.com and Blogger and I recently registered a domain and downloaded Thelonious. I'd love to learn more about it and I'm looking forward to hanging out here.

[andreasnrb]

Welcome welcome

[andrea_r]

Hi Ileane! :) I remember speaking to you on twitter.

[chipbennett]

Woo hoo! Lots of newcomers to the Tavern lately!

Welcome! Fix yourself a drink, and make yourself at home.

[Jeffro]

Welcome to the Tavern. Great to hear that you've finally purchased a domain and are ready to make the leap to self hosted. Out of curiosity, what are some of the key differences between publishing content on WordPress.com versus Blogger?

[Ileane]

Jeffro, Wordpress.com has a long list of themes to choose from and now that they've announced a dedicated Theme team they're adding more flexibility to the new themes such as custom menus. Blogger's template designer doesn't really compare but at least you can easily create pages in Blogger now.

My favorite feature of Wordpress.com is the support and forums area. It's well organized and the moderators are extremely helpful. There's an active community of Wordpress.com bloggers that you can access directly from your dashboard via "Tag surfer" and "Blog surfer" options. Wordpress.com also has a great library of video tutorials that are current and easy to find.

On the other hand most of the "support" that I've encountered in terms of Blogger comes from individual bloggers that create templates and hacks. Google has a Blogger YouTube channel with a handful of video tutorials most of which are outdated.

Another major difference is, as you may already know, Wordpress.com does not allow ads or any javascripts, while most people on Blogger can't live without either of those things.

In defense of Blogger besides the earning potential you can replace the default commenting system (which is an absolute must) with Intense Debate and install the CommentLuv plugin and I'm a big supporter of CommentLuv:)

[Ileane]

Thanks for the welcomes everyone!