Week 6 - Experiment 2

I created 3 illustration blogs (on Tumblr, Wordpress and Blogspot) and documented the main differences I noticed when making them. Though I consider myself technologically challenged, I actually found them all fairly easy to use.

I'll talk about Blogspot first (the one I am most familiar with). You can log in with a Google account, which is a benefit for those who use Google mail (most people I know). The screen for composing blog posts is very straight forward and there's just one for everything (text, images, video etc). You can enter your own html, but there's no need to. Anyone competent with Microsoft Word could pick this up without even trying, and it's good that you can upload more than one image at a time, though once they're uploaded they can be hard to move around.

Blogspot

adding images on Blogspot

I found Wordpress very similar to Blogspot for entering text but there were a lot more options. You can easily enter images into a text post but there is also the option to do a 'quick post' (simple text OR image, you have to choose). There is also the option to decide what 'format' your post appears in (standard, gallery status) which seem to overcomplicate things a bit but as they say on their homepage, "we have something unique" - some people might like things like this.

Wordpress

I encountered problems on Tumblr, when trying to get the posts to look consistent with the other blogs. Though it's really easy to use, you have to conform to their layout. 

I tried to post 3 images using the image post option, but Tumblr is designed to have only 1 image per post; so it put one big picture at the top with 2 small ones underneath when I wanted them all the same size. Confusing!

Instead, I tried to put the images in a text post. I used the same text for each blog to test the differences. For absolutely no reason, on Tumblr the quotation marks didn't show up in the title!? (Actually, on Wordpress the title for one of my images didnt appear at all). In an image post you can't have a title - only a caption.

Even though it was annoying that I couldnt make pictures in the same post the same size, I could easily upload them as separate posts. However, one advantage it has compared to Blogspot is that you can easily choose the order of the pictures, while on here they're really difficult to move around once uploaded.

When I tried to centre images it didn't work, I'm sure a simple bit of HTML tweaking could do this, but for someone looking for an easy blog this is frustrating.

See how the 3 blogs turned out in the next post.