Here is how this blog came to be:
A coworker took time off last minute to go and get married in Vegas this weekend. He setup a blog they both are posting to. I hope I'm the first to coin the term "e-loping."
I've been planning on splitting my main blog, ViNull.com, into two sites now for the last few months. I want to keep ViNull.com focused on .Net and programming, but I miss the days when I didn't care about SEO or "focus". I have really important shit to say, and quite frankly the internet would be remiss without my content.
Add to this Cicelie's new site, FinsAndStems.com, will have the same issue. To build a great site on water gardening you are going to have to keep low the off topic posts.
So stealing the joint blog idea was a no-brainer. I fully intend to move this blog to my other hosted sites, and run it with ViNull Siding, but I'm booked and can't take on a new project now. No problem, I'll use wordpress.com and get a hosted blog, then move it later. Or so I thought...
I have long recommended wordpress.com to people looking to start a blog, though I've never actually used it myself. I had used blogger in the past and I still ache when I remember what it took to extract my content from the site and move it to my own host. I'm going to apologize to anyone I've ever recommended wordpress.com to now, and encourage starting a first blog with blogger.
Issue one - templates. On wordpress.com, you have to pay for the privilege of what your blog looks like if you don't want one of the crappy "skinny centered" defaults. Yes, the stock templates on blogger suck, but I can - without the need of a credit card - edit the raw HTML.
Issue two - domains. Want to have a name that doesn't end in .wordpress.com? $10 per year, please. I was willing to pay that, but then I learned wordpress wants you change the nameserver records to them instead of just pointing a CNAME or A record at the server. F-that, you don't get my entire domain because I have a blog with you. Blogger not only allows you a custom domain for free, but takes a CNAME.
Issue three - feeds. I know I'm going to move this site, so rather than worry over trying to make the new site RSS feed location match I want to use FeedBurner.com to manage the feed location. I regret not doing this with ViNull.com because I want to make changes to the feed there and it's not going to be pretty no matter what I do.
Issue Four - interface. I am a computer programmer - very good at what I do - yet I have trouble figuring out the massive wordpress control panel. Cicelie's one post into the blog was a bitch that it took 15 minutes to find out how to post. I speak all the time about how important user experience is, maybe I need to invite some wordpress developers.
At this point, I went and checked out blogger, and found it had improved since I last used it and did everything I needed. I may have to work at moving posts like I did last time, but I'm fine with that. The great irony here is wordpress is an open source blogging platform - you can download and run yourself all the code that runs the hosted blog service, yet the hosted service is very closed. Maybe wordpress could do a little less ranting on other's lack of openness, and look at themselves instead.
2 comments:
I'll concede your other points readily enough, but what's so hard about posting? You log in to wordpress and there's a big link that says "New Post" at the top. Press that, type your blog post, and push the "Publish" button.
You only see the bar once logged in - so if you go to your blog, there isn't a link to even log in. On wordpress.com "Sign in" isn't listed in any of the navigation item - instead it's hiding as a block in the page content. Once you do sign in, the bar does appear, but the sign in block changes to a link to your blogs so you click that link instead of seeing the bar at the top. Then you are in the monster dashboard, scanning to find a link to post. Granted, once you've found it it's not hard to find again, but that initial experience isn't inviting. Cicelie and I both had the same experience and were left with a bad first impression.
Contrast to blogger - a sign in link is at the top of your blog, and that takes you to a sign in form on the blogger homepage. After signing in you are at the blogger dashboard, and a big green plus sign draws your attention to the new post link.
It's not like wordpress is hard to post on, but that it's daunting the first time you do it.
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