thoughts on the Blogger to Wordpress upgrade
Things I like about Wordpress after a couple of days...
- The dashboard summary which includes 'Incoming Links', recent posts and comments at a glance. Wordpress also provides? basic statistics (hits, entry page, referrer). It looks like the data? is automatically cleaned of spiders and bots so the figures you get are more likely to relate to actual human beings. You can also remove hits incurred as part of administration.
- Being able to easily and quickly define a hierarchy of categories and tag your posts. I thought that the RSS feed for an individual category is really good as it means that Oracle types can choose to only subscribe to that element of the blog (and ignore football, music and gadgets).
- Categories also helps navigation. If someone wrote a gem of an article two years ago about Linux, you are more likely to be able to find it using categories rather than trawling through the complete blog.
- RSS feed for comments.
- Clean, quick, intuitive, well designed interface.
- The post editor which includes a WYSIWYG preview. I used to dislike the? fact that the Blogger Preview used a larger font so? sub-consciously I didn't view it? as the finished article. The Blogger Preview, Close, Edit, Preview? cycle required a lot of key clicks and wasted time. The Wordpress preview is precisely that.
- Automatic pings to ping-o-matic (and on to 15 services including Technorati).
- The fact that pasting in text from Blogger preserved the hyperlinks. I am still perplexed as to how that worked.
- Posting seems much quicker compared to Blogger. No more waiting and nervously watching 'This may take a while if you have a large blog'.
- Indenting quoted text correctly uses the 'blockquote' tag.
- Support for trackbacks and pingbacks as opposed to Blogger's backlinks.
- Support for breaking long posts using 'More'.
- The price.
Minor things I don't like so much
- The lack of template editing isn't a big issue for me. If I was that fussed, I would use wordpress.org and host it myself. Manually tweaking HTML templates isn't exactly my idea of fun. What I would really like though is a Template Editor so you can select which elements (RSS feed, Comments feed, individual Category feeds) appear on the main page. My Yahoo! provide something similar to select and arrange content on the home page.
- The fact the tagline 'Blog in Isolation' does not appear in the Pool theme.
- No automated tool to import from Blogger. I think one exists but is currently in for repair. My blog was only 30 articles so I laboriously cut and pasted all my blogger articles (and lost the two comments).
- No support for Technorati tags in the post editor but I think I prefer using Wordpress categories anyway.
another change of scene
Dear Reader
We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end.
I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me.
The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog.
However, unfortunately my owner's head has been turned by the use of 'categories', an RSS feed for 'Comments', trackback links which he still doesn't understand and a new, trendy beta version of a blogging platform used by the Scobleizer (and Eddie Awad) so he has dumped me in favour of http://andyc.wordpress.com/
Wordpress automatically provides a feed for the new blog from http://andyc.wordpress.com/feed/ and a separate feed for comments (which is a nice idea) - http://andyc.wordpress.com/comments/feed/
My owner also deleted and recreated the Feedburner feed despite the dire warnings (he was too stupid to fathom out the fancy auto-redirection) so http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndyC may or may not still work or you might have to remove and recreate it.
After all we have been through, you still mean a lot to me and I hope that we can still be good friends.
All my love
The Blogger bytestream that was 'Blog in isolation'
Winter is the time for migration
I was investigating the bewildering world of trackbacks, pingbacks and blog comments and found that my existing provider, blogger.com, supports backlinks (inbound links to a specific article from a Google search) but not trackbacks.
Then I discovered Wordpress.org which is a blogging tool that supports proper trackbacks, pingbacks (and a whole lot more besides). Although Wordpress is a freely available OpenSource PHP based application, I would need to upgrade my current web hosting to include PHP (for the massive sum of an additional 4GBP per month).
Then I discovered the hosted service Wordpress.com which offers the same functionality so I registered for an invitation email. A little more research unearthed the useful fact that the recently released Flock browser also includes a free Wordpress.com account. I immediately downloaded Flock and got myself this new, shiny Wordpress blog.
I like the blog editing facilities (you can tag each post in multiple categories) which may render that tedious task of manually adding Technorati tags obsolete.
Pros: trackbacks, pingbacks, categories, builtin referrer tracking, immediate WSIWYG preview, automatic Technorati pings
Cons: no direct access to Web server logs and statistics, need to manually import existing blog from blogger, centred formatting, need to burn new feed, lose thousands of readers