The blogger is done with Blogger

Posted by steve on April 6, 2007 |

I’ve pretty much stuck with Blogger since the beginning, before Blogger became a Google property, when it was one of the few freely available blogging tool that existed. So what induced this loyal Blogger blogger to finally change over? One would think that I was dissatisfied with Blogger’s capabilities, but that’s quite the opposite. In fact, the newest version of Blogger, with its tags & widgets, has all of the features that I’ve always wanted.

For the most part, my switch to WordPress almost represents a step backwards. Hosting my own blog, running it on a local database rather than one that will potentially last forever somewhere in Google’s massive server farm. Customizing my own templates, throwing in Plugins to coax WordPress into what I want it to do. In fact, WordPress doesn’t have any official support for tagging, and still relies on a somewhat antiquated category system to deal with post organization.

So why switch to WordPress now? I wish I had a better reason to justify it, perhaps it was just my urge to be able to tinker more than I could with Blogger, perhaps it was the notion of having complete control; maybe it’s even the possibility of implementing WordPress on more sites, where the owner doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with giving everything up to Google.

Whatever it is… I’m happy with the move, until next time, that is.

Meanwhile, here are some tips to getting WordPress up and running:

• Install Sidebar Widgets:
  This addon will give you the ability to widgetize your sidebar. It’ll make the various sidebar components much easier to manage than editing the files directly.
• Inline Ajax Page:
  This is the plugin I use to automatically truncate posts, and be able to expand them on the fly. I like this much more than WordPress’s built-in method to split post. This is also closer to what I used to do on my Blogger page. Expanding post on the same page for reading has always been more appealing to me than linking to subpages.
• Most importantly… Simple Tagging:
  There are a couple of plugins that’ll extend WordPress to work with tags. This is one I picked over the other, for its combination of flexibility and simplicity.

Let’s see how long I stick with WordPress before I get crazy and install something else

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