12 years, 11 months ago-
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With the recent Blogger problems, I thought it might be interesting to see what blogging platform everyone uses? I use self-hosted WordPress for my 2 blogs and have since 2007. I like the versatility of themes although I’ve settled on a favorite (Atahualpa-love the customization without the cost), being able to put any ads I want up (not sure if free WordPress still won’t allow Google ads), and just the comfort of not having to worry about my site disappearing or disabled because a company decides to for whatever reason.
The only issue I’ve had is having my blog hacked about 2 years ago. There is nothing like going to your webpage and seeing “Hacked by such and such gang” to make your heart stop. Luckily, I was able to access the dashboard and get it back up, but I stressed. And it was all my fault for not keeping the WordPress version up to date. I also had an issue with a plug-in that was causing the site to crash, but quickly fixed that.
So what blogging platform do you use and what do you like or not like about it?
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Ah, great question, indeed! I always warn people not to get me started on my rant about WordPress, Blogger, and “free” or “open source” platforms in general.;-D
Stephanie, your mention of hiring someone to make the switch starts to get at the problem, as I see it. The short version of my rant is, “Free is way too expensive (for any product/service you’re going to depend on for your business or anything important to you.”
Now, to disclose my prejudice, I’ve been using TypePad since 2003. I don’t get paid to endorse them (haven’t even taken advantage of their affiliate program, though I keep meaning to!) But I certainly have a comfort level with making the platform do what I want.
The killer-app part for me, though, is that when I get into a spot I can’t figure out, I’m paying them and feel completely entitled to demand answers, service, solutions. And in nearly all cases, I’ve gotten them within 24 hours, from tech support people who know their stuff.
I have multiple WordPress horror stories, going back to my first attempt to use it for a client project back around 2005. The web hosting provider had installed the then current WP version 1.5 and we built a blogsite and within a month they released version 2.0. We were stuck, because the hosting provider refused to let us download the new version, several key pieces of what we wanted to do would have required substantial tweaking for 2.0 anyway, and the theme developer for the one we were using had no interest in continuing to support the 1.5 version when we needed it (wouldn’t even reply to questions).
This year I tried very hard to learn to love WordPress and the BuddyPress community platform to launch this very community. When I logged in and found the third major “upgrade” in about 3 months, in which they’d moved everything around in the interface, changed were some things were in the “parent/child” code structure, and generally thought it was fine to make a “newbie” start over in learning how to just get blogging, I gave up on it.
BTW, if you have no idea what I mean by stuff like “parent/child” code structure … my point exactly!
I hate it when programmers forget that blogging is supposed to be easy for everybody!
Anyway, TypePad is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. In the end, you’re using a publishing tool on another server, many miles away, and there are going to be coughs, hiccups, or whatever you want to think of them as.
But bottom line, I still find TypePad the most consistent, easiest to learn and use “professional” quality platform for folks who are serious, but don’t want to “hire someone” to get started.
Long version over (with my apologies),
Tom
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We’ve been on Typepad since we started several years ago. (http://www.vetwisdomcafe.com) We’ve considered trying to make the move over to WordPress, but so far at least, haven’t done so. I really like Typepad, so far anyway, in spite of hearing about a lot of issues. I haven’t had any! 🙂
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Ooops! What lousy promoter I am! ;-P
Hey Everybody:
If you come to BlogPaws 2011, you can check out my TypePad session, or attend the one on WordPress with the amazing Nikki Jeske, along with deep immersion in lots of other blogging and social media topics and TONS of fun! Bring your friends (human, furry, feathered, “flat” – whatever), too!
Here’s the preliminary program agenda.
Of course, Stephanie, as you make your choice and get started, you can ask more specific questions here, too.
Good luck!
Tom
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Darn! I wish I was coming to Blogpaws this year! (It’s not in the cards, at least as of yet.)
Tom Collins said:
Ooops! What lousy promoter I am! ;-P
Hey Everybody:
If you come to BlogPaws 2011, you can check out my TypePad session, or attend the one on WordPress with the amazing Nikki Jeske, along with deep immersion in lots of other blogging and social media topics and TONS of fun! Bring your friends (human, furry, feathered, “flat” – whatever), too!
Here’s the preliminary program agenda.
Of course, Stephanie, as you make your choice and get started, you can ask more specific questions here, too.
Good luck!
Tom
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After almost three years of blogging daily The Boomer Muse on a Godaddy hosted platform, I took the leap to a self-hosted WordPress for a cat-centric website/blog Cat Wisdom 101 recently. I’m fairly tech savvy but the new platform fried my brain; I threw in towel and had to hire a tech pro. I’m tweaking and getting my feet wet, but don’t even think about WP unless you are geeky.
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I use self-hosted WordPress for my website/blog, and I’ve been using it since 2007. The only major problem I ever had with my WordPress site wasn’t due to WordPress itself, but to a poorly coded theme that caused my site to crash.
WordPress is free, but it’s also got a huge following, with a huge community that’s able to offer support on everything from hardcore coding to the basics of installing WordPress. Many hosting providers offer WordPress hosting, and they have tech staff who know how to deal with any back-end issues you might face.*
Where I would recommend you spend some money is in purchasing a theme for your site. As I mentioned, some themes are not very well-coded and can cause big problems when they clash with other plug-ins you can use to enhance functionality. Paid themes are designed by people who have a vested interest in making sure their products work, and most theme makers have user documentation for the themes, as well as active forums where you can get answers for questions or issues you have.
The theme I’m currently using on my WordPress site is a self-customized version of the Organic-Verbage theme by Organic Themes (I bought it for $69, and it was totally worth the cost, and more).
I should say here that I came to WordPress with very solid HTML and CSS skills, and armed with Photoshop so I could create my own banners. Customizing themes is pretty straightforward, in my opinion, if you have these skills. You don’t have to be geeky to use WordPress once it’s set up, but it does require some geekitude to be able to buff, shine and customize your site to your heart’s content.
I’ve used pretty much every content management system there is: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Dot Net Nuke, and even legacy blogging platforms like LiveJournal–and in my opinion, if you want a powerful tool that’s easy to use once the site is set up, you can’t do much better than WordPress. (On the other hand, Dot Net Nuke is positively hellish to customize–I use it at work, so I get to bash my head against it on a daily basis.)
If you have any questions about WordPress, please feel free to ask me and I’ll do the best I can to answer them.
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*I’ll put in a plug for HostGator here. I switched from GoDaddy to HostGator when the theme-caused disaster took place. I didn’t realize it was a problem with the theme, but the guy who was on the chat with me when the problem was still occurring after I moved hosting providers … was actually looking into the back end as I was talking to him, realized that the problem was with the theme, and got rid of the bad theme so I could redesign my site (which I was planning to do anyway).
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Great to have everyone’s input!
I am not tech savvy at all when it comes to coding. Don’t know CSS; If I can find HTML for what I want I might be able to manage to plunk it where it needs to go; But Google is my best friend. When I first started using WordPress I would copy and paste the CSS into another document and then start tweeking things to customize how my theme looked. Just experimenting. I figured at least I had the original copied somewhere as back up. That’s why I like Atahualpa because I can customize it without having to know CSS (They have a very active forum. I’ve never asked a question, but have been able to search and find answers I needed.) I wish I was more proficient at Photoshop and could do graphics, but that’s out of my realm right now. I would love to have a professional header for my review blog, but need an idea of what I want first.
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