My Blogger Buster

Why I would choose Blogger rather than Wordpress?

2013-08-18T09:54:00.001+05:30

Blogger Vs WordPress -- Every Webmasters and Bloggers Battle. One might find Blogger Or WordPress content on numerous blogs and also forums but today I am about to post why I'd personally stick using blogger and not go intended for WordPress. I realize many web owners will disagree with this post but this article may open their eyes. Just look into all the actual below points.

Expenses

The first point and rather the most important for a new blogger is expenses and the money he is going to spend on his blog. We all know Blogger is completely free. There is no charge for hosting or the sub-domain.
If you go for WordPress you have to pay for Hosting + Domain which may cost you around $100 which you can save on Blogger. Other than that a WordPress user may have to buy additional plugins, Security services and premium theme for his blog. That would cost you around $100 more. Well you can alternatively choose best cheap web hosting for hosting your WordPress blog which will minimize your expenses.

Installation

WordPress says that it has 5 minute installation but is that so?? I don't think so. A WordPress user has to edit .htaccess file, choosing whether to keep www or not and inform the same to Google Webmaster Tool, protect important files, Change the permalink settings, making wp-config.php more secure and better and a hell lot of things.
But when it comes to blogger it is hardly a matter of seconds. Choose the subdomain, blog title and start posting. Thats it. Blogger has everything simplified making user experience better.

Customization

Blogger has a Template Designer in which you can easily set the width of columns, change header style, background, colors and many different things. Bloggers post editor is simplified too. The layout in blogger helps you to add Widgets very easily. The new and improved template editor helps you to customize every bit of your template with the help of CSS and HTML which is extremely easy.
Newbies as well as Intermediates would find customization in WordPress a bit difficult. The edit theme option requires you to know php which I would regard as a bit tough than CSS and HTML

Themes

No doubt WordPress has more themes than Blogger but are all of them free to use ? The answer is No. WordPress themes which are of good quality are sold at high rates whereas 99.9% of the Blogger Templates are free of cost. As I have already mentioned Blogger templates are easy to edit and customize but the same does not applies for WordPress.
When it comes to quality WordPress themes are really good but it is not difficult for a Blogger template designer to convert that WordPress theme into a Blogger Template.

Migrating

Suppose you sell your WordPress blog so in order to complete the process you would need to change Nameservers of the domain and changing hosting server and lots of other time consuming steps. During the process your blog may have to be down for sometime too. This may be real pain for one.
In blogger all blogs are hosted by Google so you can't migrate your blog but you can do something more simpler and easier i.e. changing accounts. You add another person as an admin and remove your self. You are done, it was as simple as ABC.

Google Services

Blogger is a Google product so it would be clear that it will be enjoying a better status than WordPress in front of Google. Google also has a better Adsense support for Blogger blogs. You have 1 click Ads installation for Adsense. Other than that Blogger blogs get SEO benefits too and all the blogs are Pre-SEO optimized. You can easily embed Youtube videos etc. in blogger.
WordPress on the other hand has no relation with blogger and does not get all the above benefits. It has to rely on costly plugins for SEO and other things.

Updates

Basically WordPress updates itself to remove bugs. Updates for adding new features have been seen very rarely. If I am not wrong WordPress is its 3.6 version but still it does not have much difference compared to its initial version.
Blogger Team on the other hand is working really hard on the platform. We have seen the updated version of blogger with a better UI. The dynamic blogger templates were introduced just a few years back. The Official Contact Form, Template Editor, Google+ Comments, Permalinks, Robots etc. are just some of the recent updates by Blogger.

Security

All WordPress bloggers would be knowing about the recent botnet attacks that affected 30 million blogs. Brute-force password-guessing attacks occurred in WordPress blogs and many bloggers who had a weak password got their blog hacked. This was a serious issue.
Blogger on the other hand is one of the most safe blogging platform. Google one of the largest internet giant runs it. There servers are never down and uptime is 100% If one wants to hack a blogger account he would have to hack the persons google account. So first he would have to find the assigned email ID of that particular blog and then try to break one the most secure systems. If the 2 step verification is on, then Mr. Hacker better luck next time. No doubt blogger is much more safer and secure than WordPress.

Conclusion :

WordPress is really a very good platform which has numerous options, plugins and themes but there is someone else in the same industry which I will portray as the "Real Blogging Boss". Blogger was started much before (1999) than WordPress (2003) and today it has way more blogs hosted on it than WordPress or any other platform and it surely rocks the online industry.
Last but not the least I am a proud blogger user and if you use blogger you should be too.

Create Awesome Contact Page using Blogger Contact Us Widget

2013-08-18T07:31:00.002+05:30

Today I will show you how to add a very awesome and cool looking Contact form in a page of your blogger blog. This contact form looks genuinely elegant and it is very eye-catching too. It did not need any third party to set up, it directly built by adding a chimp of codes in your blog.

This contact form built on CSS and it has a very rich feeling inside it. You can make your Contact page far more awesome by having this widget to your blog. A reside working demo on this widget appears by hitting the beneath button.

Live Demo

After seeing the demo if you wish to add this contact form in your blog then follow the steps below.

Step 1 : Adding the Contact Form

First of all add a Contact form widget to your blog. Do not worry about that the widget will be visible everywhere on the blog and our motive is to show contact us form only on a particular page. We will fix it in the second step.

Step 2 : Adding the CSS

Once you have added the Contact form widget go to Blog Title → Template → Edit HTML. Now add the below given CSS code just above ]]></b:skin> .

#ContactForm1{
display:none;
}
#contact_wrap {
margin: auto;
width: 321px;
height: 380px;
padding: 25px;
border-radius: 1em;
border-top:1px solid #dbdbdb;
border-right:1px solid #b2b2b2;
border-left:1px solid #dbdbdb;
border-bottom:1px solid #9d9d9d;
background-color:#cccccc;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(GradientType=0, startColorstr='#f2f2f2', endColorstr='#cccccc');
background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(top, #f2f2f2 0%, #e6e6e6 50%, #cccccc 100%);
background-image:-moz-linear-gradient(top, #f2f2f2 0%, #e6e6e6 50%, #cccccc 100%);
background-image:-ms-linear-gradient(top, #f2f2f2 0%, #e6e6e6 50%, #cccccc 100%);
background-image:-o-linear-gradient(top, #f2f2f2 0%, #e6e6e6 50%, #cccccc 100%);
background-image:linear-gradient(top, #f2f2f2 0%, #e6e6e6 50%, #cccccc 100%);
box-shadow: 1px 1px 5px #ccc;
}
#contact_wrap h3{
color: #e8f3f9;
font-family:Georgia;
font-size: 20px;
font-style:italic;
font-weight:bold;
margin: 0 -36px 20px -36px;
padding: 12px;
text-align: center;
text-shadow: 2px 0 0 #1f4962;
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 25px rgba(0,0,0,0.3),0px 1px 5px #666;
-moz-box-shadow: inset 0 0 25px rgba(0,0,0,0.3),0px 1px 5px #666;
box-shadow: inset 0 0 25px rgba(0,0,0,0.3),0px 1px 5px #666;
background-color: #3689b9;
position: relative;
}
#contact_wrap h3:before {
content: ' ';
position: absolute;
bottom: -10px;
left: 0;
width: 0;
height: 0;
border-style: solid;
border-width: 10px 0 0 10px;
border-color: #333 transparent transparent transparent;
}
#contact_wrap h3:after {
content: ' ';
position: absolute;
bottom: -10px;
right: 0;
width: 0;
height: 0;
border-style: solid;
border-width: 0 0 10px 10px;
border-color: transparent transparent transparent #333;
}
#ContactForm1_contact-form-name{
width: 270px;
height:auto;
margin: 5px auto;
padding: 10px 10px 10px 40px;
background:#f6f6f6 url(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_4bT-maq2vm9aeEmblN2gS_SipvTPgwDoy1HLC1STVPgyTZLK_h_DlezB1BtpQMXn4a4SXHWut82ElarvoI4c5SbUTUkuUbATL0dJoBc6-ymEDZr3xZcjclQiEv_pxw-Ry6I3jYupz7s/s1600/user.png)no-repeat 10px center;
color:#777;
border:1px solid #ccc;
-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
-moz-border-radius: 4px;
border-radius: 4px;
-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 1px 3px inset, #f5f5f5 0px 1px 0px;
box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 1px 3px inset, #f5f5f5 0px 1px 0px;
}
#ContactForm1_contact-form-email{
width: 270px;
height:auto;
margin: 5px auto;
padding: 10px 10px 10px 40px;
background: #f6f6f6 url(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin_Qw8f3rw_8c89pRtTn6A2XEbERrD8IaXh1YbybgmcbTQgieOR52i1sPRr52k4GG3RHuqp8DIJeF1MpZKLx5KAJva6XvBTuKdCxuz-ZBBq3bW84ZzPR78u9edyVvxoqQc2W9ziXpwhPw/s1600/pen.png)no-repeat 10px center;
color:#777;
border:1px solid #ccc;
-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
-moz-border-radius: 4px;
border-radius: 4px;
-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 1px 3px inset, #f5f5f5 0px 1px 0px;
box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 1px 3px inset, #f5f5f5 0px 1px 0px;
}
#ContactForm1_contact-form-email-message{
width: 270px;
height: 150px;
margin: 5px auto;
padding: 10px 10px 10px 40px;
font-family:Arial, sans-serif;
background: #f6f6f6 url(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikZxY9pYCwZXofPopjCHNVkc0I9J_SHctWlwARcAiys9YJlBehs0YNvPxGYUNBmxw8mxz_8nJDM0-nWeQvUJN869EcMDDLS0C6hkmVv7NtQElpEWX_6N55Pff1asMaRQGY91tkmSt1Xc0/s1600/msg2.png)no-repeat 10px 10px;
color:#777;
border:1px solid #ccc;
-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
-moz-border-radius: 4px;
border-radius: 4px;
-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 1px 3px inset, #f5f5f5 0px 1px 0px;
box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 1px 3px inset, #f5f5f5 0px 1px 0px;
}
#ContactForm1_contact-form-submit {
width: 95px;
height: 30px;
float: right;
color: #FFF;
padding: 0;
cursor:pointer;
margin: 25px 0 3px 0 0;
background-color:#005a8a;
border-radius:4px;
text-shadow: 1px 0 0 #1f4962;
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 35px rgba(0,0,0,0.3),0px 1px 5px #666;
-moz-box-shadow: inset 0 0 35px rgba(0,0,0,0.3),0px 1px 5px #666;
box-shadow: inset 0 0 35px rgba(0,0,0,0.3),0px 1px 5px #666;
background-color: #3689b9;
border:1px solid #194f6d;
}
#ContactForm1_contact-form-submit:hover {
background:#4c9bc9;
}
#ContactForm1_contact-form-error-message, #ContactForm1_contact-form-success-message{
width: 320px;
margin-top:35px;
}

After adding the code save the template.

Step 3 : Adding the HTML in Page

First of all we need to create a new page and to do this firstly go to Blog Title → Pages → New Page → Blank Page. Page editor will open, now click on HTML tab and paste the below given code in it.

<div id="contact_wrap">
<h3>Contact Us</h3>
<form name="contact-form">
<input id="ContactForm1_contact-form-name" name="name" placeholder="Name" size="30" type="text" value="" />
<input id="ContactForm1_contact-form-email" name="email" placeholder="Email" size="30" type="text" value="" />
<textarea cols="25" id="ContactForm1_contact-form-email-message" name="email-message" placeholder="Message" rows="5"></textarea>
<input id="ContactForm1_contact-form-submit" type="button" value="Submit" />
<div style="max-width: 222px; text-align: center; width: 100%;">
<div id="ContactForm1_contact-form-error-message">
</div>
<div id="ContactForm1_contact-form-success-message">
</div>
</div>
</form>
</div>

<style type="text/css">
#comments, #blog-pager, .breadcrumbs, .post-footer{display:none}
</style>

After adding the above code, publish the page.

Congratulations, You successfully added a contact us page in your blog. Don't forget to write your views below in the comment box.