Comparison & Description

Comparison of Blogger and WordPress

WordPress is developed in PHP and it is open source therefore millions of PHP developers developing more widgets and to make its interface more user friendly to attract more number of people (technical and nontechnical).

Blogger provides direct access to the templates that means user can edit the template through HTML. Because understanding HTML is difficult for nonprogrammers; therefore they may have to stay with readymade templates. On the other hand WordPress's web templates are more stylish, professional and may not need to be changed.

Blogger's interface is more user friendly as it has pre-defined page layout and components on the page can easily be shifted/exchanged by drag & drop. Furthermore, in blogger, widgets can be added simply by right clicking the page’s position and selecting desired widget. On the other hand the WordPress is complex for non technical people because it does not provide facility to change page layout through GUI interface but by editing HTML you can change your page layout.

Bloggers provide facility to upload images and videos (up to 1GB) where as WordPress facilitate to upload images only till June 08 but later it provides facility to upload videos and music as well. In both services there is no need to write code for playing music and videos, users just need to select and upload multimedia files through a simple interface.

In blogger, there is no GUI which facilitates non technical web masters to add menus in their blogs. Whereas WordPress persuade non-technical web masters to add menus in websites/blogs through simple GUI.

Both provide facility to create account to access their services free of cost (only basic services) and account creation is easy even for newbies.

While registering a free domain name, both services append suffix in user’s selected (typed) domain name.

Both services save the contents of your blogs/websites on their servers, in this way these services encourages End User Programming by eliminating lethargic process of uploading web pages through FTP. Furthermore, Google provides an option to publish user's contents on user's server via FTP. This facility eliminates to use .blogspot as suffix for your blog.

Google analytical is being used by users of blogger for viewing statistics of their blog. Wordpress's users use their built-in tool named Stats

WordPress's users are not permitted to add third party ads on their blogs like Adsense, Yahoo ads etc. Whereas Google Adsense can be added in blogs of blogger.

Blogger provides Google search engine (searches World Wide Web) as component to be added in your blog by just selecting it. On the other hand WordPress provides built-in search engine that searches the phrase/query only from your website and provides the result.

Blogger uses Anti-spam tool for avoiding un-wanting comments on user's blog. Defensio is being used by WordPress for avoiding spam.

Blogger Vs Wordpress

a) Wordpress Pros

WordPress’s interface is user friendly and easy to use even for non-technical webmasters. For developing user’s own website/blog, they just required to create WordPress account only.

The WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor for managing the contents of the website in WordPress is simple to use. There is no need to write HTML pages as in Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and user can upload/edit contents of their site/blog with as ease as they are writing an e-mail.

WordPress offers free web hosting and sub-domain name for site/blog.

WordPress provides a large number of web templates/themes and plug-ins. Furthermore, PHP developers can develop their own plug-ins to be used in website/blog.

WordPress is open source, therefore millions of web developers working for it.

WordPress users support each other for using WordPress, developing plug-ins and lots of other through WordPress forums.

b) WordPress cons

Though WordPress’s interface is user friendly but still non technical people may face problems for editing the HTML code to make your blog/site’s page layout attractive.

We have experienced that some of the offered plug-ins in WordPress are resource intensive, thus utilizes more server resources which could lead to a slow website.

In WordPress, though many plug-ins are being developed by PHP developers but it is still difficult to insert these plug-ins into WordPress because editing HTML and inserting PHP scripts is difficult for non technical webmasters.

a) Blogger pros

Blogger’s interface is user friendly and simple to use even for newbies. Users are required to create account only and have to select a web template and components for their blog. Moreover the users can use their existing Google Accounts in order to use blogger. It also allows non-programmers to navigate the Dashboard components by drag and drop.

Blogger has simple WYSIWYG editor for managing the contents and setting up your blog layout. It allows the user to add/edit HTML for modernize your blog layout and contents.

Blogger solved many problems like web hosting, server, hacking because it hosts your blog on their own web server and provides security for your blog.

It allows registering your desired sub-domain names for your blog (if not registered before).
Blogger gets benefit from other Google products like Google Adsense (Google Ads/advertisement), Google Analytical (provides report on your blog visitor), Feedburner (provides statistics on readers of your news feed), Picasaweb (provides 1 GB space for hosting pictures for your blog), etc.

Blogger allows for fast direct image uploading into the post/content and even allows for Hindi writing (multiple language support).

One good free way of setting up a quick site on any interesting topic, users can earn money by placing advertisement in their site/blog. Furthermore, bloggers are being used by people for sending traffic to their other sites.

b) Blogger Cons

We have experienced that blogger is still struggling with FTP publishing and browser compatibility issues.

It is still difficult to insert external (user developed) components, widgets (portable chunk of code) or plug-ins into Blogger due to it’s code compatibility. User may need to import external widgets because blogger is lacking to have a large number components or widgets which does not fulfill user requirement.

Blogger offers to choose web templates from limited number of themes. Furthermore, the web templates offered by the blogger are similar in their look and feel. Although user can upload its external template but mostly it doesn’t appear the same in the browser as designed by user due to browser compatibility.Blogger has authority to delete a blog without issuing any warning if they don’t like the posts/contents of user’s blog or the user violate the rules defined by blogger. In fact blogger is much strict to their defined rules and regulations.

Dynamic Web Development

DYNAMIC WEB DEVELOPMENT

There are a few vendors (service providers) who provide End User Programming (EUP) to develop websites, blog, journal or diary. We avail their services online to manage our website layout and contents at run time. Most common vendors are given below:

i) Livejournal [9] is open source software launched in 1999 used for developing blogs, journal or diary. It is designed considering those individuals who are nonprogrammers by providing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for developing website and provides WYSIWYG editor for uploading posts on their websites/blogs.

ii) Movabletype [8] is blogging software developed in 2001. It is used for building websites, blog and social networks. It’s services are not only utilized by individuals who are non technical webmasters but a number of companies are using it to promote their businesses who cannot afford professional web developers.

iii) WordPress [7] is an open source blogging tool, developed in PHP in 2003 as a non-hosted blog publishing platform. WordPress launched in 2005 as a hosted version of the original software.

iv) Blogger [6] is a web service developed in August of 1999 by Pyra Labs, a tiny company in San Francisco, bought by Google in 2003. It is further elaborated in next section.

The following table 2 and graph 1 represents the unique visitors or hits of one year from November 2007 to November 2008 on their sites.

Graph 1 Comparison of Most Common Service Providers in Terms of Unique Visitors on their Sites

Table 1 and Graph 1clearly shows that Blogger and WordPress has a lot more unique visitors/hits than LiveJournal and Movabletype. Following figure shows the Page Rank [11] of above mentioned service providers.

Graph 2 Comparison of Service Providers in terms of Page Rank

Though we may not compare services provided by these tools/websites by finding out the unique visitors/hits and page rank but these findings depict popularity of these services. On basis of above analysis, we have selected Blogger and Wordpress for further exploration as these both have comparable unique visits per month and both have adequate page rank

Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0

a) Pros

The layers feature. You should convert to tables just before uploading the document, but for the actual creation of the site, you shouldn’t bother with tables until you are all done. Internet Explorer supports tables, not layers. The brilliant thing about layers is that you can move things all over the place and reposition them to your heart's content. Can't do that as easily with tables.

The site map navigation. Once you've established your root folder and home page, every item you add, be it object or webpage, is automatically included in the map. Link it, and you start to create a hierarchy that’s very easy to see and manage. Relative links show up in black, absolute in blue and broken links in red, so it’s simple to tell if you've got a problem. You can expand as much, or as little as you want. For very large sites, it might make sense to collapse the tree; you can always expand it if you need to.

The HTML editor is very easy to get to and manage. For some functions, it’s absolutely essential.

The template feature. Dreamweaver gives you the ability to create a template file in a vector-based graphics application, such as Adobe Illustrator, or Macromedia Freehand, and then import it to your blank page as a 50% gray image. This template allows you to position your layers on a pre-designed image, and tweak them if need be.

b) Cons

A steep learning curve. It takes a while to learn the basics of this sophisticated program, and you still feel a little lost at times. There is so much you do not know. For people with little or no programming experience, it really is a daunting program to learn.

Some of the features, like the Form Editor, are not particularly intuitive. The software assumes that you already know how to write code, and will have to tweak it in the HTML editor. This program is not for beginners. The way it handles frames. Because some browsers don't support them, but if they did, Dreamweaver is not the program to use to learn how to use them. We've tried to create frames in Dreamweaver, and have not been very successful. We had much more success with Front Page.

STATIC Web DEVELOPMENT

STATIC Web DEVELOPMENT

For purposes of this study we looked at the two top selling website creators/editors i.e. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Pros and cons are as follows:

1) Microsoft FrontPage 2003

a) Pros

The interface, like many of Microsoft's products, is familiar. The application has a similar look and feel to MS Word, or PowerPoint. Navigation is not difficult, and menus are in all the old familiar places.

Viewing the source code is a click of a tab at the lower left. From there, it could be easily manipulated and changed if needed.

Frames are really easy to create and set up, due to Front Page's Frame Wizard.

The Insert menu has a lot of great, ready made objects to put in your site, like Banner Ad Manager, Hit Counters, A Scrolling Marquee, a Table of Contents and more.

Also in the Insert menu is a very easy to use Form insert feature. Clicking on a form object, like a text field, automatically adds a form box, submit and reset buttons, already coded. You only have to select the object and go to Form Properties (In Insert>Form>Form Properties) to designate the server, the CGI script, who to e-mail the results to, and where to get the confirmation page. Everything is right there.

Navigation is pretty easy, as well. Once you have established your root and home page in the Folder List, the rest seems to take care of itself. Images and other items are added easily and embedded.

The Absolute positioning feature. Its perhaps the best thing in Front Page. This feature allows you to select an object and move it anywhere you want on the page. You can even move a table, an image, anything but text. It will not allow you to wrap other things, however. For that, you will need to switch to the Wrapped Positioning (in the Format menu). So you do need to be aware of your text.

b) Cons

The inability to create layers. One of the things about Dreamweaver is its layer feature (more about that later) and Front Page doesn't have it. You can create tables, but it’s not the same thing.

The quick preview option. You cannot choose a browser to do a quick preview. That requires an extra step or two. Still, it’s not that bad.

The site map navigation. Images are not stepped back, either. There isn’t anywhere to establish the Home Page, and then create the hierarchy from there. Plus there were extra folders in the site that you do not put there that we assume are there by default. The navigation for the site map will take some getting used to.

Non Technical Webmaster

In the past few years, Microsoft and Google have made tremendous efforts for encouraging end user to develop their own websites. Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Google Blogger and WordPress are major products that have been developed before but limited for designing the web pages and blog management rather than developing the websites that meet the entire user needs that include e-business, security, record keeping, content management etc. Our research deals and explores non-programmer web development, the issue, in a new manner that explains how much work has been accomplished before, compares existing work and recommends that how much work can further be achieved.

Intoduction

A feasibility study is an initial study undertaken to assess a project’s viability. It can also be used to give an initial analysis/comparison of existing solutions, and can also recommend/provide the best alternate solutions.

One way of defining “programming” is as the process of transforming a mental image of desired results/output for a computer into a representation that can be understood by the computer [1]. Non programmer web development is something that is done not by a trained web programmer but by an end user. Users surfing the web and using web based applications usually know what they would like in an application/page if it is not already there. They have the scope and vision for that particular requirement, what they lack is the technical knowhow and the programming expertise to implement that requirement.

Programming for common users has always been a difficult task. There has already been a lot of research done for making programming more easy and accessible. One such research thread brings to light the advantages of letting the user demonstrate his required output by demonstrating with an example. This is called programming by example (PBE) or programming by demonstration (PBD). The concept behind some of these systems is to analyze the users’ examples and to automatically generalize the program using artificial intelligence techniques. Some surveys of PBE and PBD include [4, 5].

There are already some tools available to do this, the most common and known among them Microsoft Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Existing tools do give some options to end users for development without programming expertise but in a limited environment. These are mainly good for static web sites or pages and do not provide backend code for users to see, so this cancels the reusability of code.

There could be a programming paradigm for non programmers that could include web application customization, content management on a web site etc, this is known as end user programming [2]. End user programming (EUP) is for non programmers. Basic concept of this programming is that users can program web applications at runtime, i.e. they can program an application and keep using it at the same time. End user programmers are people who write programs as a secondary job function. These programs are written to support the goals that they have to achieve.

We propose to provide a feasibility study that provides extensive & better options for dynamic web development for end users.

Applications for tools created for non programming web development will greatly facilitate non technical web masters to maintain and manage their web sites. Also such a tool will greatly help users customize applications such as shopping carts, message boards etc [3]. Some limitations of tools based on this concept are that they cannot provide extensive, dynamic ways of web development. Also, tools can be programmed with pre defined procedures and designs and can never compete with live creative programming.