Finally chosen blogger for my blog rather than wordpress

Hello everyone. This is my first post on my blog with my domain name but hosted at blogger. I've read dozens of articles about what to choose between blogger and wordpress, and previously I chose wordpress, worked with it, messed up and finally quit blogging. All this happened even without writing a single post! And I also went fanatic earlier to buy a domain name from dynadot(the same which hosts wikileaks), so I thought myself very much patriotic with wikileaks and all the *good* things.

And the reason why I chose blogger is its simplicity. Yes. Unless I have 10,000 readers or 1 million pageviews a month, I'm not going to move away from blogger at any cost now. I like blank white spaces and simple design, and while writing this post, it gives a soothing effect to my eyes seeing blank area on right, not crowded by updates, news, plugins update and pingbacks(as in wordpress by default).

Also cost is an important factor. Blogger comes for free and has more uptime than wordpress.com. Yes I could go for wordpress free blogs but they lack domain mapping and also need many upgrades which are provided for free by default in blogger. A general disclaimer, I am not a google fanatic or under their spell, but actually their product is worth appreciation.

And the criteria for choice between blogger and wordpress must be page load time. Unless the page loads fast even on a slow connection(i mean even gprs from mobiles, capped to 120kbps by damn big companies), the blog isn't perfect. Remember everyone in India and developing countries doesn't have a broadband, maybe there's FIOS elsewhere but I'm concerned with people in general like me.

Another criteria for choice is making things automatic (yes i didn't spell it automattic, as by wordpress founders) because a new blog writer needs to focus more attention on writing. And to do that, its far reasonable to have everything installed by default whatever is necessary than searching for plugins and reading how to's. And blogger has done that perfectly, because as I'm typing, I see SAVING with 3 dots in the trailing, about 5-10 seconds as I pause in between and it doesn't show multiple auto saves. So that is  more neatly done in blogger than wordpress. And blogger stats are comparatively more efficient than wordpress  stats because they are a renamed version of google analytics, possibly the most powerful analytics tool(though there are open source alternatives like piwik analytics which can be installed on your site, which is good for corporate and personal sites where you want to make analytics information private by default).

Regarding the templates, yes there are about 1300 wordpress themes and also premium ones on wordpress.com, including minimalistic design. In response, the template section of blogger has fewer themes but far more superior in customization including the site width, colors, number of columns and footers. Any web designer must make a note that visual designing options in a theme, such as sliding through a switch(as in gantry framework of wordpress) and blogger,  must be essentially included if you want to create a masterpiece.

Another drawback to wordpress is its evolutionistic nature, means that if you're using wordpress 3.1, its impossible to revert the upgrade or to revert back to 2.8 or say 2.5. This is because of core upgrade with every new release. But since blogger serves static html pages and has a clearly defined framework, all blogs are backward compatible. This is possible because the core remains same, only additional options are added. Because of this I am able to use minimalistic theme that was released about decade ago. So in backward compatibility, blogger has no competition(though the widgets cannot be used when reverting).
However this possible in wordpress by exporting the blog, then installing old release and installing previous versions. This process consumes a lot of time. Also newly added plugins that are not compatible to old versions, cannot be used.

Why I am talking too much of backward compatibility? This hit my mind when I tried to install a torrent tracker on wordpress using a plugin that was compatible upto 2.5. Now I have no ideas for torrent trackers, but the basic idea of backward compatibility remained afresh.

So finally a full stop to the wordpress vs blogger debacle. My verdict is that if you have ambitions to make a million dollars from your website, go for wordpress, write another tech blog, and become an unpaid/paid full time news reporter and reviewer for big brands. I have seen many blogs running under owners name, but filled with reviews from washing machines to ovens. They are very big SEO experts or even have web hosting companies, but the exact notion of a personal blog is destroyed.
Back to the topic.

If you want to write a clean, original and reader oriented blog, go for blogger and if you start getting good readership, its feasible to move to wordpress later. If you happened to achieve that stage of readership, I would recommend you to skip all sorts of shared hosting offers(even if say *unlimited*) and go for a decent vps or dedicated server, write 2 hours a day and research atleast 6 hours. Then you can settle up as a full time blogger like amit aggarwal at labnol.org

But if your motive is to write for pleasure, as I do, keep writing at blogger and move anywhere when you feel that this is the turning point and do not move anywhere before that.

Sorry for covering too many topics randomly, but its unplanned and written directly from mind. I'll try to be more organised next time. Be free to comment, complement or criticize me in the comments box below, but remember the limits.