So, WordPress then

So, WordPress then

It has now been a week since The Great Day Of Moving, when I ditched Blogger for WordPress on this very blog. How’s it been?

Actually, pretty good. There’s a few things I miss, a few things I’ve gained, but (most importantly), I haven’t regretted it. I’m now considering shifting my Gaming Diary over to WordPress too, but that’s going to be a bigger task, and one that I’m tempted to avoid until a few things are ironed out. Anyway, here’s my list of what’s better on each of the two systems:
Reasons Why WordPress Is Better Than Blogger

Publishing times. By a long mark, this is the main improvement. Basically, there aren’t any publishing times any more. It used to be that I’d post to my blog and perhaps five minutes would pass before I could see the changes. Yeah, it’s due to the way I was publishing to FTP and a Blogger-hosted blog wouldn’t have that problem, but I wanted to self-host.

Widgets. Those things over there on the right (unless you’re reading this in the future and I’ve removed them!) – they’re things I couldn’t do (or at least, were somewhat limited) on Blogger. I’m especially pleased with the fact I can have a list of categories.

Page navigation. With Blogger, when you get to the bottom of the page, you don’t have an “older posts” or “back” link. This really ruins it if you’re reading the whole site, as you keep having to click a month archive instead. Again, a Blogger-hosted blog allows this, but FTP? Nope.

Picture and file uploads. TinyMCE > Blogger Create Post. Not only does it insert images where you want (not only at the top of the post, and you then have to move them yourself), but you can resize them. It’s also easy to link to files and pictures uploaded on previous posts too.

Reasons why Blogger is better than WordPress

Yeah, it isn’t all smiles and ladybirds. There are a few things WordPress needs to catch up on:

Tag management. On Blogger, they’re called Labels, but they’re the same thing. WP supports tags (although it’s only a recent development), and even has a Tag Cloud widget, but the main problem with it is that when composing a post, tags in the tag box don’t autocomplete as you type them. This might sound like a tiny thing to you, but I use this feature all the time on my gaming diary, where I have some 80+ tags. On this blog, I’ve left them as Categories (although I don’t see why WP needs both those and tags), and I don’t have many so it isn’t an issue here, but it’s something I’m not moving my diary over to until it’s fixed.¬¨‚Ć However, it’s in the plans to be available in the next version (2.4) of WordPress, so that could be soon. In the meantime, some plugins do help.

Post submission emails. When this blog was on Blogger, I was sent an email every time I posted. This sounds like a silly thing, since I’m the only one posting, but when posting via email from my phone, especially when doing it via Flickr, I like to have a response to say it worked.¬¨‚Ć I can’t seem to find that option anywhere.

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