Everybody remain calm.
So I've been tossing around an idea for some time, but didn't really have anyplace to go with it until my friend Arvind e-mailed me earlier this week. I'm thinking about defecting away from Blogger. Shocking, I know, but as good as it is for beginners and dilettantes (both of which I was not so long ago–and which you might argue I still am), Blogger definitely has its limitations: no search capability for the entire contents (including archives) of a blog, limited customizability, no integrated TrackBack functionality, no support for categories, etc.
Also, since I now have my own domain, I thought it might be nice to integrate my web presences in one place. In order to publish a blog on my own domain, however, I'd need blog publishing software. The main platform for doing this, of course, is Movable Type, but it is relatively expensive (read: not free), and therefore against the very spirit of blogging and the internet. Then there's iBlog for Mac, which is also not free. As for free publishing software there are Greymatter and, the one my friend e-mailed me about, WordPress. I was pretty impressed with WordPress when I checked it out, and now I've installed it on my domain's server, which was insanely easy (they advertise that you can do it in under 5 minutes).
Now for the hard part: making the decision. I'm all but ready to do it, except that I'd like to find some way of porting my old posts over, if possible. If not, it's not like I'll be deleting this blog anyway, so they won't disappear. Hmmm.
posted by Richa @ 10:56 AM
4 Comments:
Bloxsom is a free and incredibly simple (too simple?) alternative. If I were making a blog, that's where I would start. But I'm not sure how well it handles more advanced features.
I know Jieun is fed up with Blogger (not to mention dotmac), and is also looking to defect to her own domain. So this could be a fun project for all of us.
Yeah, maybe too simple for me. WordPress, architecturally, is more complex, but more robust, I think, and definitely more fully-featured.
The other thing I like about WordPress is the template presentation feature. Templates are rather more complicated than their Blogger cousins, but vastly more flexible and extensible. Plus it's an excuse to brush up on my PHP.
And don't get me started on the dotmac. As it is, I'm paying $100 a year for just e-mail and 250 MB of storage. A bit ridiculous.
yes, I'm fed up!
I have to renew my dotmac soon but really don't want to pay that much. i like its convenience but when i try to edit my photo pages, Safari often crashes. and it's slow.. i'm not that happy that i have to host images for my professional site at dotmac for now.
where do you host your things? because i only payed for domain name and host everything on dotmac.
I host with Host Excellence, one of the top rated services out there, with this plan. For about $5 a month (which works out to be a little more than 1/2 of what dotmac costs in a year), I get 4 times the storage at dotmac, 24/7 support, and all the perks of hosting with a professional service: databases, scripting, etc. Plus it's one of the only services that offers IMAP mailboxes, not just POP3. My only complaint is that they advertise free domain registration with this plan, but they didn't say that .name domains are ineligible for that feature, so I had to pay for domain registration separately. Kind of annoying, but not a deal-breaker.
Post a Comment
<< Home