Blogger vs tumblr

Upon signing up blogger somewhat leaves you to your own devices, you sign up, pick a theme for your blog and can just start posting. The themes aren’t bad and I could normally find something that I was imagining my blog to look like, fairly easy to change subtle things in the design, and widths etc. I found it to be kind of a slow editor as well as little bit poorly organised. I found myself really struggling editing my page at times, finding I had made something a colour I hadn’t, and not realising until I was posting in my blog later.

Tumblr is a little more frustrating uponfirst login, it kind of forces a user to explore each element of the dashboard through popups. This is probably good for those who need instruction, but it was a little annoying not being able to turn this feature off, especially for someone who had made previous accounts and knows the site. Tumblr has a much simpler navigation that I like and it’s editor is really good. Customizing I found quite easy, but there really are a lot of templates I thought were free that ended up costing money and this frustrated me a little they featured these first and I had to scroll through them all. I found the templates that there was less room to move, there were little options to change the layout without editing the html itself. You could only change a few colours etc, whereas on blogger you can edit the width, size and location of a lot of the content, tumblr templates are a lot more static, which kind of leads to seeing very similar blogs all over the site.

Tumblr’s html editor is fair more advanced than bloggers. It’s quite difficult to write and code raw html in blogger and actually have it work. For example I published one page of my portfolio website I’d been playing with on tumblr, though I found I could not post this same html in blogger, it kept coming up with all kinds of errors saying it didn’t understand the code, no matter what I did. This is probably blogger’s biggest weakness, though it’s easier to play around with templates, you really have to obey their line of coding if you want to make your own customized website or blog. Also, I found tumblr had a great feature where you could add separate pages, blogger doesn’t have a feature like this; you can only really do this through tagging and linking back to posts. You can make other blogs with one blogger account, which I found to be helpful, but kind of hard to link all the blogs together seamlessly.

Probably the main weakness on tumblr is the commenting system. I found that it was really limiting when commenting on peoples posts, word limit and a one post limit, also I was blocked from commenting on a lot of my friends posts, some I could comment on, others I couldn’t. I found that when people had commented on my posts, that some of the comments people had made would actually disappear on some posts after a while. There was a more advanced commenting system you can plugin into your tumblr account through disquis, but it’s kind of a pain having to sign up and a completely different site. And this commenting system doesn’t even allow one to post through tumblr, but through google accounts or facebook which I found kind of pointless unless a lot of anonymous people were following you.

So as a conclusion I think blogger is definitely better as a blogging site, where tumblr is less of one. I guess one really only has to analyse the name of each to realise this though, a lot of my friends on tumblr really use it to spam junk, whereas on blogger I’ve found people seem to put more effort into their posts. Tumblr is for tumbling, blogger is for blogging. I will continue to use both, though I’ll probably still be wishing for improvements in both sites.