WordPress Good

A few weeks ago I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I wish I had done it sooner. WordPress is not only a better blogging platform, it belongs in a whole different plane of blogging platform. Here are some of the reasons I switched.

Problems with Blogger

It’s hard to complain about a free service. But Blogger does have problems that made it, in my case, almost more harmful than helpful in maintaining my blog.

The most critical problem was with uploading my blog to my site. I host my own site. See the URL up there in the address bar? You’re at www.jeffwofford.com, not at jeffwofford.blogspot.com. This difference means that all of my blog files have to sit on the server that I rent from Doteasy, my ISP. Yet with Blogger, my blog would actually be edited and maintained on blogger.com.

This means that in order to “publish” any changes to my blog—even the slightest change—Blogger would have to send the files that made up my blog over to jeffwofford.com. It did this via FTP, and for several years it worked just fine. But about a year ago, the Blogger publishing process started stalling in the middle of the upload. Blogger could still get through an upload once every few days. But the rest of the time, publishing would stall.

Well, problems happen. Usually you look online, find some setting you were missing, and the problem gets fixed. But it turned out that thousands of users were having this problem, no one had a solution, and Blogger just would not deal with the problem, month after month after month.

I began to feel the “freeness” of Blogger. You get what you pay for.

If blog publishing software can’t publish, then what’s it good for? This was the biggest problem that drove me to WordPress.

A smaller problem, but even more irritating in a way, was Blogger’s edit window. The little window in which you edit your posts is tiny—maybe 20 lines tall. I know it sounds niggling, but when you live for hours inside any workspace, the smallest problem begins to really grate. Those 20 lines began to feel like a cage. I kept searching for some way of expanding the window, but Blogger just doesn’t make an option available. What a shame! And yes, in WordPress there’s a setting to control how large the edit window is. I doubled mine to 40.

The last problem wasn’t really Blogger’s fault. I had heavily edited my Blogger template in order to make my blog pages resemble the rest of my site. Later, Blogger updated their template system to incorporate all sorts of nifty new features—widgets, themes, and so forth. But because I was committed to my old-style template, I couldn’t use the nifty new features. I could have reworked my blog into Blogger’s new system. But if I was going to do that, in light of the other problems, why not try a different blogging system?

Strengths of WordPress

Several people had suggested WordPress, and I liked the look and functionality of the WordPress sites I visited. I decided to give it a whirl.

As with Blogger, WordPress offers the option to either host your blog for you (on wordpress.com) or to let you host it on your own site. But there’s a big difference in how WordPress handles the latter case.

When you host WordPress on your own site, you do not have to deal with a centralized server at all. With Blogger, I had to go to blogger.com to modify my blog—change the template, modify settings, even just add a post. But with WordPress, the whole WordPress system sits on my site. I never have to deal with wordpress.org at all. I can add posts, change settings, moderate comments—everything, and it all happens on jeffwofford.com.

With WordPress, you actually download all the WordPress source code—everything that makes it work—and keep that code on your own server. That way you’re completely independent. The WordPress organization could go out of business and my site would still work. I like that sense of autonomy.

It’s also faster. There is no “uploading posts”—where you post is where you publish. I can edit a post, “update” it, and it’s updated a split second later. It’s all happening on jeffwofford.com, so there’s no time spent transfering files.

Another advantage of WordPress is the sheer power of the system. The whole WordPress blog administration area is lightyears beyond Blogger’s. You can quickly add and edit posts, change tags and categories, and moderate comments. There are plenty of settings to modify if you should want to fiddle with the way your blog works.

Even the blog editing window is far easier to use than Blogger’s. You can quickly upload images, insert them into your post, then WYSIWYG drag them to the size you want.

WordPress has a wealth of themes you can use to shape the visual style of your blog. Then, if you know PHP (a common programming language on the web), you can modify your theme to suit your tastes. I chose Thematic as my base theme because it’s feature-rich and blank. Then I modified it to appear the way you see here.

Then you have WordPress plugins, another world of coolness and power. Plugins can do just about anything—from modifying the way your posts are displayed to recording user statistics to modifying the way the blog administration area works. I use Akismet, a blog comment spam filter that comes prepackaged with WordPress. I have another plugin for embedding Flash in my posts, another for embedding music. Every week or so I find another plugin that helps my blog work better.

One of my favorite WordPress features is threaded comments. In Blogger, commenters could only reply to the main article. In WordPress, you can reply to each other as well. Since dialogue is one of the key features that makes blogging different from traditional publishing, threaded comments alone would make the switch to WordPress worthwhile.

WordPress released version 2.8 yesterday, along with a video showing off the new features. I installed the upgrade—so far I haven’t seen any glorious advantages.

But the upgrade did coincide with a problem that will illustrate why WordPress rocks so hard.

I’m not sure how it happened, really. I was testing out WordPress in Safari 4.0. I was editing a new post in Firefox. And somewhere at about the same time, I upgraded to WordPress 2.8. Dumb.

Somehow in the mix, one of my recent posts became corrupted. The whole text went missing except the first four words. Ack!

I decided to see whether Google had cached the post. They did have a link to it but no cache. Double ack!

In Blogger, that would have been the end of the line. The post would have been lost with no chance of recovery.

But then I noticed in WordPress something I hadn’t seen before. In the administration page, at the bottom of the post editing area is a list of all the “past revisions” of a post. You can look at the post as it was at every point along its composition and publication. You can restore older versions. You can even compare two versions to see what changed. Amazing! Source control in a blogging system.

So I simply restored the post to an intact version. Problem solved.

So WordPress was more stable, more resilient, even in the middle of a botched upgrade than Blogger is when running on its own server without being fiddled with.

WordPress is one of those systems you learn to simply trust. It’s open source, has thousands of users and an avid development community. Problems get killed quickly. Desirable features—like configurable edit window sizes or post revision histories—get added by somebody eventually. It has enough eyes looking at it, mouths talking about it, and fingers poking at it to make it into really good software.

So if you’re thinking of starting a blog, you’ve heard my recommendation. I really can’t think of a reason to use Blogger.