Have we got blogging platforms for you!

Kasia Mikoluk writes an informative, practical article - Best Blogging Platform: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, SquareSpace, or Typepad?

Blogging and social media are, in many respects, bound up with one another.  Tumblr, for one, is a blogging platform that's become more social media.  Twitter, for another, is social media that touts itself a micro-blogging.

But the two are actually distinct.  Blogging upholds the journalist and writer in us as well as the diarist and introvert in us.  To complete this analogy, social media offers a forum for the conversationalist, actor and model, voyeur and audience that we often are.

I've used three of the five platforms that Mikoluk reports on, so here are my experiences.  Please keep in mind that these are just my personal experience (i.e., n = 1, in research and statistics).  Yours may or may not be different.

WordPress

I had a web developer create a blog for me, and I liked his design.  WordPress was fairly easy to learn and convenient to use.  I was a first-time blogger a few years ago, and I didn't quite figure out how to upload videos (i.e. via embedding).  But it was easy enough to take a screen shot, upload this, and insert a link to the video itself.

However, what made my WordPress experience increasingly nightmarish was spam comments.  I'd get 100 in about a week.  I looked several times for some spam filter, and never found it.  I asked friends on Twitter for help, and they recommended different apps.  But finding the right app was more trouble and expense than it was worth, and in time I just ended up dispensing with WordPress.

Just like the old Dodge Caravan I drove, which needed several aggravating recalls for all sorts of fixes, WordPress is completely off my radar.

Blogger

The best thing about Blogger is its Google ecosystem - Google+, YouTube, Gmail, Search, News, Android - which I love and am impressed by.  I can toggle across my accounts easily, and one profile and photo cover multiple sites.  Its look and versatility make it like a website for me, and for certain projects I use it as such.        

On the minus side, it has taken a lot of time to learn the intricacies of its functionality.  For example, getting approval for AdSense, associating it with different accounts, and setting up the ads on each site weren't always so straightforward.

Also, a simple thing like uploading videos from YouTube (never mind other platforms) can often be a pain in the neck.  The normal route for this relies on the video title, not URL or embed code, which is problematic when the video is relatively unknown.  The embed process works well, but only sometimes, and is virtually useless for non-YouTube videos.

Thankfully all of these have been minor frustrations, at worst, and quite manageable at the end of the day.  

Tumblr.

I'm new to tumbling, and so far it's been the easiest to use.  That's its competitive advantage apparently.  It offers very cool, creative designs, not just themes or colors, but also unconventional templates.  It doesn't have the versatility of Blogger, but it makes up for this shortfall with convenience and look.

Recently, for example, I discovered the queue function and quickly learned how to use it.  Now I don't have to set aside time to do my daily uploads.  I queued five posts yesterday, and each one will automatically upload per day.