Sunday 29 September 2013

Plusnet Unlimited Broadband Review

After Upgrading from the now discontinued Plusnet Extra Broadband with a 60GB Monthly allowance to the Broadband Unlimited Package last month we've been unable to get to anywhere near where we were when we were on the 60GB Allowance.

If you want a truly Unlimited Broadband Package that is good value for money then go with Plusnet Broadband Unlimited, but you will be better upgrading your Router to the Netgear DGN 2200 ADSL 2+ Modem Router as the one that  Plusnet provided is cheap and tacky with an Admin Control panel that isn't user-friendly or the most intuitive of UI's.

Since I originally wrote this review the Netgear DGN 2200 ADSL 2+ Modem Router that we were using suffered a major failure after doing a Firmware update and we have since replaced the Router with a Belkin one, and I'll do a quick review of the Router in a couple of weeks time.

This Review was originally posted on my old Blogger Blog, but I've decided that I should migrate it over to my WordPress Blog for continuity with the series that preceded it. Original Post date was 09/02/2013.

Roland


Google+

The One Thing That I've Enjoyed While Using Blogger

The One Thing That I've Enjoyed While Using Blogger is the lack of off topic and Spammy comments, but that's probably due to the fact that I never got any comments while I was actively used Blogger due to the fact that I couldn't get a decent amount of followers & viewers.

WordPress really needs to sort out its Akismit Spam filter as it's awful at filtering out Spam from legitimate comments, as when I re-started using WordPress this morning out of 40 Comments that I'd got 3 were correctly filtered to the Spam folder and out of the 56 that were filtered to the pending folder approximately half were in correctly filtered as legitimate comments that I'd then got to sort through manually.

Rant over

Roland


Google+

Blogger Vs WordPress And Why I Decided To Return To WordPress

In this post I'll compare Blogger Vs WordPress And Why I Decided To Return To WordPress.

I switched my Blog from WordPress to Blogger in late 2011 to explore all the tools that Google offer for Blogs and Websites such as Analytics and AdSense, but I was unable to build up a following similar to what I had built up on here.  Google then took it on themselves to block my AdSense Account stating that I'd breached the Terms & Conditions of AdSense, but never explained what I'd supposedly done to breach the AdSense Terms & Conditions. I then tried  to get Google Authorship & Author Rank working which it never did properly, but I still continued to write posts until this year when I just couldn't be bothered with Blogging any more that is until this morning when I decided to dust off my WordPress Account and start again.

The main reasons that I decided to ditch Blogger and return to Wordpress are:

Admin Console

  • Blogger's Admin Console is to cluttered and not logically organised compared to the WordPress Admin Console.


Customization

  • Blogger relies heavily on editing HTML & XML code to do a lot of the Customizing of a site.

  • Most of Blogger's Themes are paid compared to WordPress that ether has more Free Themes or a 50/50 split.

  • Blogger isn't as user friendly as WordPress to get to look how you want it.


Sharing

  • Blogger only has the choice to share a Post with Google+ compared with WordPress where I can share with Google+, Facebook & Twitter along with other social services that I'm not a user of.


Post Editor

  • Blogger's Post Editor is a simple lightweight editor.

  • WordPress's Post Editor is a Feature rich editor that has all the options that you would expect in a Word Processor.


Categorizing Posts

  • Blogger only uses tags to categorize posts which is a bit limiting.

  • WordPress uses tags and Categories to categorize posts which gives you a lot more flexibility.


Themes

  • Blogger's Themes seem to be highly geared towards the average user, but require HTML & XML coding knowlage.

  • WordPress's Themes cater for everyone from the average user and are easy to customize to your exact needs via drag & drop widgets and don't need any code editing to get what you want.


Miscellaneous

  • Blogger seems to be heavily geared towards users of Google's services who want to take advantage of Google AdSense to make money or Professionals who have money to invest in someone to code the Customization of their site just the way they want it, but they do offer unlimited free video & images in posts.

  • WordPress is geared to the average Blogger who wants to just produce content, and has an easy to use set of settings for customization. WordPress also offers various Add-on Packages if you want more that the basics you get with the Free service.  WordPress has a very helpful Support Team and a very useful and friendly forum. WordPress also offers the WordPress Framework as a free download from http://wordpress.org/ if you want to self host your WordPress site from ether a leased Server or your own private server which is very handy if you are a company that wants to keep their Blog in-house or if you are just the average user that wants the greater flexibility that you get with self hosting ether privately or via a leased server.


I also found that getting any form of Ranking was totally impossible most of the time with Blogger, compared to with WordPress & no matter how much effort I put into tweaking the Title of a Post I could never get a Rank anywhere in Google compared to WordPress where a little Tweaking and re-tweaking if necessary I could get a decent Ranking depending on the Post subject.

Roland


Google+

Why I've Decided To Move Back To Wordpress From Blogger

After spending the last couple of years experimenting with using Blogger as my Blogging Platform and most of this year not Blogging I've decided to come back to WordPress as my chosen Platform as I felt that with using Blogger it was hard to get a decent daily viewership to hat I'd become accustomed to when I was regularly using WordPress.

Also I found Blogger a bit limited with what you could do in the way of customizing your Blog without having to resort to HTML & XML code and a lot of the themes are Premium compared to over here on WordPress.

Blogger is the ideal Platform if you can dedicate your time to working at getting the best out of it, but it can be a bit hard to get a decent Google Search rank for articles compared to using WordPress which strikes me as a little odd as Blogger is owned by Google you would think that it would Rank Blogger articles higher than WordPress articles, in the past I've spent more time on trying to tweak the title of articles using Blogger than what it has taken me to write the article only for Google to not Rank it at all where as with WordPress I find that a couple of tweaks of the article title can get an article Ranked at the top of the first page depending on the topic.

I'm probably now going to spend most of my time getting all the Google Authorship stuff sorted out for my WordPress Blog and start enjoying Blogging again.

Roland


Google+

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