Blogger versus Wordpress: A Battle of Widgets? Part I

After having spent quite a while on going through blogs and forums dedicated to the "your blog is a money maker" phenomenon, I have turned yesterday to another issue that “blows” a blogger’s mind: WIDGETS! My first results of this reorientation lied in discovering the nofollow campaign, also known as dofollow, released on the Internet by some bloggers looking for some fuel to provide for the interaction on the World Wide Web among those who are fond of the Web 2.0 thing.

Meanwhile, in both of my queries about the world of blogging as far as it concerns the money-making and widgets topics, I noticed that the majority of those with a high rate of visitors paid a great deal in their design to the comments section, be it with the “recent comments” item or the “top commentators” one. When I realized that, I hesitated no more and went straight to Google asking for “top commentators for bloggger” and “recent comments for blogger” widgets, tips and tricks. Unfortunately, the only thing I found was lots of zip folders for the Wordpress plugin, both with “recent comments” and “top commentators” widgets and some hacks for putting the “recent comments” item on Blogger.

It was then that I thought about changing my blog platform and go for Wordpress. However, after some days spent on the respective platform installing even a carbon copy of the blogspot blog, I gave up the idea. I do not like wordpress’s way of editing, its design, even its name and logo and I know I am not the only one who doesn’t. Yet, I have to admit that if taking into account the variety of plugins that wordpress offers to its users compared to the amount offered by blogger, than the first one is by far better. A quick glance at what Wordpress offers to its bloggers and wht Blogger doesn’t gives the following results:

1. Recent comments.
2. Top commentators.
3. Recent posts.
4. Most popular posts.
5. List of related posts after every post.
6. Label cloud.

5 of these issues cab be solved as it follows:

1. By using a Blogger templates widget
2. List of recent posts with advice from the IT Skyline blog
4. It can be done manually using some statistics about your site.
5. Related posts (that come after every post) comes from Purple Moggy's Blog.
6. A hack for the label cloud from Phydeaux3.

No, it was not a mistake there. I did not forget or skip number 3 “top commentators”, I simply found no solution to this, although some bloggers already speak about disliking and giving up on the plugin, because of the spam issue. The only thing I found was a solution (in Russian only) that consisted of a combination of the recent comments hack with a widget provided by Grazr, yet I do not quite like, so I am still hesitating whether putting it or not on my blog.

Apart from revealing the ongoing battle between the two most populars blog platforms I want here, in my first post in English on the INconstantIN’s Blog (except for the posts with some scholarships, trainings and jobs offers) to find out which of the two platforms is mostly used. So, please, vote! In case you have any comments or advice, feel free to do it. I even disabled the comments moderation for a faster interaction of the users.