All right, I'm still setting up all my stuff here. I didn't think I'd see the day where I would move from WordPress to Blogger, and yet here we are. Even if I never triggered the sidebar glitch, it was only a matter of time before WP's "change for change's sake" drove me off. Despite that there is so much objection to the Block nonsense, they are still insisting on pushing it on everyone. The Classic Editor is due to be phased out from next year, and once that happened, I would have had to leave anyway. It's a shame, it really is. Anyway, enough of the angst.
Compared to WordPress at its best, Blogger is severely lacking. For one thing, the media uploader is terrible. You can't drag and drop as you can in WordPress, and when you access your media gallery, you're shown a gallery of everything, with the oldest images first, and no way to search or filter.
Wordpress
Blogspot
So for this reason, I'm uploading everything to PostImages. So if I do ever need to move again, I don't have to worry about migrating my images. Also, inserting an image via Blogger will result in very messy, cluttered code. It's terrible.
Embedding 3rd party media is not seamless. In WP, you can paste in a link to a Youtube video or Tweet and it will automatically embed. On Blogger, you need the following format for YouTube:
<iframe width="480" height="360" src="https://youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID_HERE" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />
And for Tweets, you need to get the embed code from Twitter.
Biggest plus point: NO FREAKIN' BLOCKS!
As I sift through my old posts, deciding what to carry over, I noticed that while I was good at always using my <p> tags in my early days (I used to be a hand coder for the site I admin'd), since WordPress automatically creates a line break when you hit Return, I at some point stopped with this good habit and just wrote out all my texts without unneeded tags. Blogger does not like this. You need to use <p> or < br /> tags or you won't get your line breaks. So yes, this is why relocating is taking so long, as I now have to clean up my code and get back into good habits again! It also means I'll be doing my editing on HTML-Kit, as ain't no one got time to be typing out tags on a touchscreen keyboard! But don't worry, if you like the WYSIWYG experience, you can still use that.
Anyway, that's comparing Blogger to WP at its best, and WP is no longer at its best.
One weird glitch on Blogger is that it counts your own views to the site. There's an opt out, but it doesn't work (I don't get why anyone would want their own hits counted, but I noticed Youtube is the same, so g00gle just sucks, I guess?). So I'd guess 99% of my views so far are just me proofreading and customising the layout. There is a workaround here. It's daft that you'd need to do this, and if I'm editing on a mobile device, my own views will count again. Fix it, please, Blogger. Also, Blogger's stats are pretty basic compared to WP. One big problem is that it seems to count every single pageview as a hit, rather than counting unique visitors, which again will skew stats.
On the plus side, I have a working sidebar again. I don't like the archive thing though. It's going to be so cluttered once I've got everything up. I liked how WP gave you the option to show only the last 5 posts.
I'd also like to have a static homepage as I did on my old blog, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do this. However, since this won't be a Sims site anymore, I guess it doesn't really matter so much.
In terms of privacy, you can't set individual posts to private or password-protected, as you can in WP. As a workaround, I guess you could set a post to draft status.
There's no distinction between Categories and Tags, so I've had to manually code the Category list in the sidebar to include only the main Labels (as they're called here), and I'll make a tag cloud for stuff that I don't post about as often. But hey, at least I have a sidebar.
Good news is that WP's <!--more--> works the same in Blogger.
I also really like that I can fully customise the CSS and favicon, unlike WP.
Anyway, those are my thoughts so far. I'm actually liking that I can clean up my blog and even though it's taking ages, it's nice to get that housekeeping done on my posts. The biggest pain will be pointing all my image tags to postimages, because even though they still work through hotlinking, I'd prefer to have everything in the one place.