To Blogger or not to Blogger?

Being new at this blogging stuff I did some research on platform (after having started this blog of course). It seems many people - mostly seasoned bloggers - are preferring wordpress over blogger. So for a while I'll be testing wordpress (where I actually created an account two years ago) simultaneously with blogger to see which one is better.

I guess you have more control over wordpress if you are running your own server, but its more difficult to get Google Analytics and shared items from Reader to work (I get the plain RSS feed, but with no attribution). I do like the clean look of the Wordpress skin better though. But that should be possible to achieve in Blogger as well with some tweaking.

Wordpress seems to handle trackbacks properly, where Blogger has a backlinks equivalent that doesn't ping the referenced blog. You should be able to use Haloscan for Blogger to solve this, but I really can't be bothered with a ton of extra steps - I just want my stuff to work out of the box.

To sum it up: if I can find/implement a cleaner template for Blogger and get trackbacks to work properly I will most certainly stay here. I might stay anyway, but those two would be nice to solve.

Google Analytics working

Ok, I found the problem with Google Analytics. I was pointing to niklasmorberg.blogger.com, a site that does not exist. At first I felt stupid for making such a simple mistake, but having thought about it Google Analytics is to blame. The error message I got from them was that my tracker was not installed properly, but the real problem was that the URL was invalid.

I'll try to report this to the Analytics team, mostly as an exercise to see if and how they respond. The proper response obviously being an update to their error message.

Improve Google Reader looks

Thanks to John Hicks for making a nice looking Google Reader skin. If you don't use Stylish, kp made a Greasemonkey version. The "Trends" link is kinda hidden, but its not enough of a problem to stop me from using it.

Edit: I tried out the greasemonkey version since I didn't want to install Stylish but there were too many glitches to make it a nice experience. Install Stylish and use the instructions on Johns site. You don't want the greasemonkey version. Trust me.