1st Post:

As I sat and pondered as to what TechAnalyze’s 1st post should be, it occured to me, what better way to start off than by reviewing blogging platforms. Hence, I take off, with reviewing the most commonly used blogging platforms within my friend circle: WordPress, Blogger and Posterous

Examples:

Here’s an example of a Blogger and Posterous blog and as for wordpress, Techanalyze.com is powered by Wordpress.

My colleague Aviraj’s Posterous blog:

My Colleague Shaheen’s Blogger blog:

How I learnt about each:

• WordPress: I heard the word WordPress way before I knew that it was a blogging platform. I kept spotting the word at the bottom of every 2nd blog I used to visit.
• Blogger: My 1st blog was a blogspot deployment. No prizes for guessing how I came accross the service. Yup, a google search for “blogging” hit the spot.
• Posterous: I was introduced to this service by my colleagues at work who were impressed with the ‘post by email’ feature.

Feature Comparision

Now, for the review, here’s a comparison of basic features:

Search Engine Optimization

There’s a lot being said about blogger blogs being indexed way faster on Google than similar blogs using a different service. I have expereinced this as well. My blog was indexed by Google almost immediately whilst my websites hosted elsewhere used to take quite sometime in comparision. However, plugins come to WordPress’s rescue again and there are plugins who would help a non-techy easily optimize their blog for search engines. Posterous isn’t too far behind. My posterous blog landed as the 1st result for a search for my name. They probably have automated search engine submission tools but the rest would depend on your content and back links.

Ease of use

Posterous winds hands down over here. All the features are ready to use and a monkey could set up a posterous blog along with using all the features they have to offer almost instantaneously. Blogger comes in 2nd. You sign up and you are ready to go. However, you would require to do some maneuvering and reading to get a hang of the system along with all its features. Well, wordpress isn’t as easy to setup and use as posterous and blogger. It will take a techy with some know how on hosting to set up a managed deployment of wordpress.

3rd party Themes

This is something I just needed to talk about in spite of it being already covered in the comparison table. The phenomenal amount of themes available for wordpress out there is something worth switching your blog to the same. Blogger has a huge 3rd party theme collection as well but not as enormous as wordpress. Posterous barely has a few 3rd party themes and one can customize their themes color, html & css to a limited extent.

Plugins

This is another area where wordpress wins hands down. You can get a plugin to mimic any feature contained within any blogging platform or any website for that matter. That’s what makes wordpress so awesome. Customization of functionality to the fullest via plugins. Something which blogger and posterous do not have. Within 1 click I could turn my blog into an iPhone web app via a plugin.

Social Media publishing

Everyone would want to promote their blog and gain maximum subcscirbers/traffic. What better way than to publisize the same than via social media platforms. Posterous auto posts your blog titles to twitter, facebook and a couple of other networks. Blogger has the same functionality. Wordpress once again has plugins that allow you to configure the same and auto post to almost every well known social network on the planet.

RSS feed and Email Subscriptions

All the 3 platforms allow you to do the same. Posterous uses feedburner’s platform. With blogger and wordpress you can choose any feed posting service out there. However, feedburener I feel is the best. You can use your own feedburner account in Wordpress and Blogger and hence achieve tremendoes amount of feed customization including monitoring and monetizing your feed. Email subscriptions too can go out from you@yourdomain.com with wordpress and blogger.

Security

All 3 are projects are regularly upgraded and hence security issues would be tackled immidiately. However, wordpress is open source and most widely used. I think open source platforms are the most secure ones out there

Content Organization and Searching

Blogger helps you organize your posts using Labels. Labels are basically like tags. So what you do is lable each post in blogger with not just one but multiple labels. Posterous uses the conventional tagging system wherin you set tags for your posts and user can search by tags. Posterous also organizes pictures in a silde show like format really well. This feature would come in handy if intend on creating a quick photo blog. Wordpress has categories and tags. Categories enable you to (yup, pretty obvious) categorize you posts. So you can have something like what I’ve done above. This post comes under the sun category blogs which is under the mother category Platforms.

Traffic Monetization

You cannot monetize your posterous blogs. Blogger offers a seamless adsense integration. Wordpress has plugins to add adsense as well as banner ads, et al.

Editing of themes

Blogger does not quite allow you to play around with the html/css of themes as much as WordPress allows you. With WordPress you can view the source code of each theme, download them to your computer, use dreamweaver to edit them and upload the changes. Posterous has but recently included a web editor which allows you to modify colors,header images thus allowing limited HTML/CSS customization.

The bottom line:

Everything that posterous can do, blogger can. Everything that blogger can do WordPress can. Hence in terms of features and functionality, Wordpress walks away with the trophy in style.

Ease of setup and use: You grandmother would be able to set up a posterous blog within minutes. Blogger and Wordpress would take some time to master but this is primarily because of their huge feature set.

Conclusion:

If you are a 1st time blogger looking to just pen down your thoughts and sprinkle it with pictures/videos taken off your cell cam; do not want to spend too much effort and want your blog set up within a few minutes, posterous is tailor made for you. If you are not too tech savy and yet want to set up a good enough blog that showcases your work, hobbies, generally anything that your are serious about, blogger is the way to go. If you are looking to build a professional blog with all the features of some of the best blogs in the world, WordPresss baby!

Feel free to comment, debate, argue or put forth any queries you might have as well in the comment section below.

Adios!