Another WordPress convert
May 5, 2006
I’ve been a ba-a-ad blogger. Just when countless authorities (well, at least two) tell me the secret to driving traffic to a blog is to post regularly, it looks as if I have dropped my keyboard and wandered off for a couple of weeks.
Well, not entirely. I don’t have any great aim of driving traffic to this site (which is just as well). I am much more interested in becoming an expert in the tools of the blogging business so I can help my clients in all sorts of useful practical ways beyond the on-going strategy.
While I am very comfortable with hacking TypePad, as (hopefully) this site shows and I know my way round a MovableType installation (which is a bit like TypePad but without the training wheels), WordPress has been a bit of a mystery to me for a while.
No longer. What a great blogging platform. Over the last few days I have installed WordPress on three different domains, chopped it up and put it back together again and played with countless plug-ins and templates.
While Matt Mullenweg and the other leading lights deserve sanctification for their work in creating the platform, I am astonished by the richness and value the rest of the WordPress community brings to the party.
This is the Firefox of blogging software. Think of a missing function or a longed-for PHP tweak and there is a good chance someone out there is working to fill your wishlist.
For now I still find it more tricky to set up an original design on WordPress than on TypePad or MT but that is just a matter of familiarity. Give me another couple of weeks - and some serious down time to mess up the domain servers - and I may shift this blog to another platform.
If you want to give WordPress a shot, the hosted flavour is at Wordpress.com