AfterVictory.com

For a while now I’ve been toying with the idea of switching Rockland-Ave.com away from Blogger.com. So starting right now, Rockland-Ave.com is now running on the open source Wordpress system. Wordpress is good for a number of reasons.

Good for me:

First, it’s really easy to make layout changes to pages. Under Blogger, there were all sorts of downloading files and republishing-entire sites involved whenever I wanted to make a change. Wordpress lets me dive into an easy browser-based area to change a color or add a new section, and updates the entire site (or not, if I don’t want it to) without pain and suffering.

Second, blog backups are smooth and easy – Wordpress downloads the entire site’s posts into a single xml file, and can be set to do so automatically. As we get ever closer to 500 posts (this is #497), not-losing-everything becomes kinda important.

Third, it free’s us from Blogger.com’s system. Blogger.com is great for a lot of people, as it’s super easy to set up and use, but if their system is down, you can’t post (which happend around the time we moved last year, and was a real drag). Wordpress keeps everything neat and tidy on your own website.

Another Blogger thing that bugged me was that each time you made a new post or added a new topic, Blogger would create another complete web page, instead of loading things dynamically. This would be like writing a long email, and instead of emailing it out, you carved it into stone tablets and passed them out to everyone in the office. We were frequently running out of disk space on our meager hosting company’s server. Under Wordpress, this will be no longer the case, as what you see on the screen is generated as-needed, all pulled from a database. Fresh and tasty posts for everyone, no-line and no-wait hopefully.

Finally, Wordpress imported all our posts (almost 500) and comments (close to a thousand) from Blogger in just under an hour, with very few hiccups.

Good for Kate:

The whole photo-adding thing has, under our Blogger.com setup, been pretty hit or miss. Kate was able to add photos, but not always with great ease. Wordpress’ photo inserting feature is smooth and easy, with no crazy HTML tag shenanigans.

Good for Rockland-Ave Readers:

Wordpress made it easy to add a “read older posts” link at the bottom of each page, and that’s a super-good thing. We can put fewer posts up front, which should make the pages load a bit faster, while not worrying about people not seeing our slightly-older-but-still-fresh posts.

The commenting system should hopefully be better now, as it no longer resides in little pop-up windows which may or may not display and may or may not be blocked at your workplace. Comments now reside on the pages with the posts, like the use to a long time ago.

Your Blogger.com login won’t be needed for commenting here. Just type in your name and comment to your heart’s content. Any lurkers out there who’ve been afraid to comment before, feel free to speak your mind now. Now is the time to de-lurk!

We have a login/password system setup too (look on the right side of the page, towards the bottom), so those of you who’d like to have a login name for the the site, go right ahead and make one, but it’s not at all required.

Blogger.com is not bad:

This switch to Wordpress isn’t about Blogger being bad, it’s about Wordpress being better for us. I want to spend less time maintaining and backing-up and more time posting. I wouldn’t hesitate to set up a Blogger.com blog again, but am now open to (and know how to) set up a Wordpress blog and might consider that if the situation was right.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Nerdery, Rockland-Ave. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.