Switching to WordPress
After getting my blog started with Blogger, I quickly looked for an alternative more suitable to my needs. Blogger is nice and free, and you can even have your blog on your own domain if you have one. However, there are some drawbacks to using Blogger:
- no categories for organizing posts
- because all pages are static HTML, the entire blog needs to be rebuilt every time you modify anything
- the main database is still stored at Blogger, even if you host the blog pages yourself
- limited customization (I admittedly didn’t start to investigate thoroughly)
After a short interlude trying NanoBlogger, a nice command-line–based blog engine for UNIX geeks, I looked at some of those giant blog comparison charts, read a couple of reviews, and decided to go with WordPress. It is available as a free hosting service, just like Blogger, as well as an open source project for self-hosters, which would be me. What is so nice about WordPress?
- categories, even multiple per post
- dynamic generation of pages from a MySQL database, using PHP templates – this means you can modify anything and see changes instantly!
- completely customizable, including writing your own PHP functions if you are so inclined
- excellent user interface (very important to me), both in terms of looks and usability
- very light and small (less than 600 KB zipped)
- installs in less than five minutes, provided you have PHP and MySQL activated on the server
- local install possible (requirements are the same)
- does not (yet) officially support multiple blogs, but can simply be installed in several locations at no cost – it’s free
The only thing that is a bit cumbersome in my case is that I need to keep two copies of almost anything synchronized; one for the English version of my blog, one for the German version. On the other hand, several things must be localized for the language anyway, so it’s only a problem with style sheets and functions which are language-agnostic. Everything else is so nice that it makes me smile every time I write a post.
In a later post I will give detailed instructions on how to install WordPress locally on Mac OS X, so you can save the couple of hours it took me to figure out why I couldn’t get a database connection.