Flirting with Wordpress
admin | February 9, 2007Over the past couple of days I’ve been dipping my toe in the water of other blogging platforms. The first thing I’ve discovered is that there is no perfect blogging platform. Typepad charges for membership, blogger has an annoying comments system and no inbuilt stats and Wordpress.com won’t let you fiddle with the CSS without paying for the privilege. I like the idea of Wordpress.org but I can’t justify paying for a server for my blog. All the other options seem a bit more ‘journal’ like and are filled with ‘Hi, I’m Catie and I’m bored…’ blogs… Not really the style of blogging I want to associate myself with.
I set up a Wordpress.com account and imported my blog and comments and I’m rather pleased with the result. Importing was easy, the only problems in translation were disappearing youtube videos (wordpress doesn’t accept javascript) and borked up web addresses associated with comments. Both problems were relatively simple to fix however the more obsessive compulsive types could spend a good couple of hours perfecting everything. All of the labels/tags/categories transferred across nicely too.
My main concerns with changing over are confusing readers and losing my google pagerank. At the moment I’m the first hit for ‘Miriam Parkinson’ but it took a good couple of months to get there and I don’t have a whole lot of regular readers so I need to keep every one I have 
If I do change platforms I think the best plan of attack is to cross post for a while, start using my wordpress address when commenting on blogs and wait for my wordpress blog to creep up the google charts until its somewhere respectable and I can switch this one off.
Please hit me (not literally) with any advice you might have. Critiques of the new blog, pros and cons of wordpress I might not have noticed yet etc.
Imported from my old blog
blogger has an annoying comments system and no inbuilt stats
which you can turn off.
and you can easily track the stats with google’s other tool Analytics.
it’s idiot proof, flexible and free.
For starters, congrats on winning the Wii!
Secondly, my advice would be to go out and get a domain and go with a service that lets you use that domain. This way you can change hosts and at least partly keep your google rating.
Another good idea (IMHO) is to use Feedburner for your RSS feed as it easily lets you change hosting with our having people have to change the RSS feed they have for you.
I know for myself having a host and using Wordpress is a lot of fun and extremely flexible. Also lets you do other sorts of web things (like for me I have fig.aflcasts.com which is very Digg liek).
Normally the cost is like $8-10 a month (I use Blue host and they are outstanding). Perhaps is you have friends and family that you might be able to host it would be fine.
Just some thoughts.
Molly
Miriam,
I was looking at wordpress.com accounts for a friend and i think if you are just blogging (podcasting too), then it is the best solution. Get yourself a domain name and you can now integrate it into a wordpress.com account so it’s all run off your domain name. And you stay up to date with all the latest upgrades too.
The best themes i’ve seen are getk2.com, http://tarskitheme.com, http://openswitch.org/unsleepable, http://5thirtyone.com/foliage. These are elegant yet relatively automated with widgets and other goodies.
Also, here’s a decent list http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/02/09/83-beautiful-wordpress-themes-you-probably-havent-seen/
I’ve used most of the available blogging tools, with long stints on Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and now using Wordpress.
I highly recommend Wordpress, I like it better than Typepad, which is a paid service.
This post was after 30 days of Wordpress
http://scientaestubique.wordpress.com/2006/09/14/wordpresscom-review-after-30-days-wordpresscom-vs-typepad/
This one was hitting 4000 hits on Wordpress
http://scientaestubique.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/4000-hits-wordpress-vs-typepad-ratio-of-51/