I’m updating my blog software this week. If you subscribe to the blog feed, you’ll need to update your bookmark/feed reader to my new feed. If you’re not interested in blog software you can skip the rest of this post.
After 800+ posts with Blogger I’m making the jump to WordPress.
In the past 6 months Blogger added many new features including tags, improved indexing, search and AdWords. The downside was that it was difficult to impossible to take advantage of these new features if you were a self-hosted blog because it relied on a Google-hosted database. What’s worse is that these changes actually broke features in “old” Blogger, such as archiving.
I spent several nights trying to hack in the new features and fix what was broken. The Blogger community was pretty helpful — their support forums are awesome — but in the end the tool didn’t do what I wanted.
WordPress caught my interest because it promised both simplicity and power. The New York Times is using it instead of an expensive content management system!
Wordpress.com can host a simple site for you in minutes. If you know a little more, and you have a web host that supports WordPress, you can host your site yourself under your own domain.
Woody offered to support my switch (he uses WordPress for danharrelson.com) but I found it was pretty straightforward. I was up and running with my own hosted WordPress implementation in an evening. Tags and indexing work beautifully. Because I host my own database site updates are instant. And sidebar widgets allow me to easily bring in my RSS feeds. (Woody I might call you in the future about PHP…)
Comments 1
I notice that you have the same problem with this WordPress skin that I did. In IE7 there’s a conflict between the skin and Snap Shots. After the page loads the top margin is reduced to zero. Let me know if you want a copy of the CSS I hacked to fix this.
I also modified the CSS to reduce the left margin so that a the three column version is a bit narrower - under 900px.
Posted 24 Apr 2007 at 11:14 am ¶