BLOG EMERGENCY. Please Help.
Please help me. I am at the end of my rope with blogger. About a year ago I talked about switching to WordPress but decided against it. Blogger has just gotten worse and worse. Please please help me reach a decision….
Here are the reasons I HATE blogger.
1. Feedburner is horrible. Horrible. I feel badly for those of you who get my blog by email… I try to attach pictures, but when I do the pictures won’t show up on blogrolls. It’s a double edge sword. A very nice reader wrote to me and said she got my blog by email. She asked if I could put in pictures, but when I did it messed up my blog on blogrolls. Nobody clicks on a story with no picture… so I could either have no picture in the email or no picture on the blogroll. I finally had to take the picture off the emails… so now the emails are super boring. I also hate that there is no way to get a list of the people who subscribe to the blog by email.
2. My pictures won’t show up in my posts. Almost every time I post something I get an email saying the pictures aren’t showing up, so I have to go back and totally redo the post and maybe the pictures will show up, but it’s not 100 %
3. The blog takes about 15 seconds to load on my laptop. If I were a reader I would leave before it loaded.
4. Every time I want to make a link open in a new window I have to edit the HTML and insert TARGET=”_blank” it takes forever. There should be an option for this.
5. Most blogger blogs have this nifty little button at the end of their posts… I can’t make them show up on my blog. I have tried at least 100 times. I have edited the code. I have checked and unchecked boxes. Maybe I started my blog too long ago? Very frustrating.
6. The overall look is not very clean. There is so much going on. It’s kind of hard for me to pay attention to the writing when I read it.
7. When you search for my name in google and my blog comes up it takes you to a post I wrote over a year ago… not the most current post.
8. I hate that’s it’s almost impossible to leave linked text in the comment sections.
9. I hate inserting flickr pictures but trying to get them to link back to a blog post… so much extra work.
10. I’m ready for a new look, but there are only so many blogger templates.
Here are some reasons I love blogger.
1. I love being able to click on the comments and go to people’s profiles and then to their blogs. I also love that their pictures show up next to the comments.
2. I know how to use it. Let’s not underestimate that fact.
3. I love how many google hits I get every day. I am not sure if this is because I use blogger or not.
4. Almost all of my best blogging friends use blogger. It’s such a nice network.
Reasons I am afraid of the switch.
1. I own my own url and don’t know how to replace the blog.
2. I don’t want to lose my place on people’s blog rolls.
3. I don’t want to lose my email subscribers
4. I don’t want to mess up all the past links to my blog.
5. I want to keep my followers.
I have thought about switching to WordPress, but I am afraid it might be too hard for me. I have written posts there before and it is so much more complicated.
With that being said, lets take a look at some blog looks I love and maybe we can decide on something. What do you think?
I love my friend Christina’s blog, Christina Loucks. It’s so clean!
Of course I like Brian’s blog, Decor Demon. The functionality is excellent. It looks like it might be WordPress, but a custom design.
Coco + Kelly is a beautiful blog. It’s blogger, but looks like a custom template.
From Me To You. This might be my very favorite blog look. I have been obsessed with it since I started blogging. It’s from tumblr, which I looked into last time I was thinking about switching. I think this is a custom template on tumblr. The pre-designed choices are not as good.
Design Sponge is clearly beautiful. It looks similar to From Me to You. I like both of the backgrounds.
Now I’m more confused that ever… Not many of my favorite blogs are WordPress. I do love a lot of blogger blogs, but mostly the ones with custom themes. Maybe that’s what I need.
Have you gone through this yourself? How painful is the transition? If I leave will you follow me?
Your VERY confused friend, Blayne
P.S. I use a program called Mars Edit to compose my blog posts. Do you think that might be the problem? Do you have a mac? if so, what do you use to compose your posts?
P.P.S. The reason I wrote this is because I wrote a beautiful post yesterday but couldn’t get the pictures to show up. Please read it if you have a second. I tried to fix it.
