thoughts on the Blogger to Wordpress upgrade
Things I like about Wordpress after a couple of days…
- The dashboard summary which includes ‘Incoming Links’, recent posts and comments at a glance. Wordpress also provides? basic statistics (hits, entry page, referrer). It looks like the data? is automatically cleaned of spiders and bots so the figures you get are more likely to relate to actual human beings. You can also remove hits incurred as part of administration.
- Being able to easily and quickly define a hierarchy of categories and tag your posts. I thought that the RSS feed for an individual category is really good as it means that Oracle types can choose to only subscribe to that element of the blog (and ignore football, music and gadgets).
- Categories also helps navigation. If someone wrote a gem of an article two years ago about Linux, you are more likely to be able to find it using categories rather than trawling through the complete blog.
- RSS feed for comments.
- Clean, quick, intuitive, well designed interface.
- The post editor which includes a WYSIWYG preview. I used to dislike the? fact that the Blogger Preview used a larger font so? sub-consciously I didn’t view it? as the finished article. The Blogger Preview, Close, Edit, Preview? cycle required a lot of key clicks and wasted time. The Wordpress preview is precisely that.
- Automatic pings to ping-o-matic (and on to 15 services including Technorati).
- The fact that pasting in text from Blogger preserved the hyperlinks. I am still perplexed as to how that worked.
- Posting seems much quicker compared to Blogger. No more waiting and nervously watching ‘This may take a while if you have a large blog’.
- Indenting quoted text correctly uses the ‘blockquote’ tag.
- Support for trackbacks and pingbacks as opposed to Blogger’s backlinks.
- Support for breaking long posts using ‘More’.
- The price.
Minor things I don’t like so much
- The lack of template editing isn’t a big issue for me. If I was that fussed, I would use wordpress.org and host it myself. Manually tweaking HTML templates isn’t exactly my idea of fun. What I would really like though is a Template Editor so you can select which elements (RSS feed, Comments feed, individual Category feeds) appear on the main page. My Yahoo! provide something similar to select and arrange content on the home page.
- The fact the tagline ‘Blog in Isolation’ does not appear in the Pool theme.
- No automated tool to import from Blogger. I think one exists but is currently in for repair. My blog was only 30 articles so I laboriously cut and pasted all my blogger articles (and lost the two comments).
- No support for Technorati tags in the post editor but I think I prefer using Wordpress categories anyway.