www.josschuurmans.com

Hopes and fears of switching to WordPress

So here I am (again) strongly considering to switch blog hosts. Currently I have it hosted on TypePad's proprietary solution, but I may have it run on the open WordPress platform. I'd say that, this time around, it seems more feasible than ever before, mainly because of WordPress.com, who nowadays offer to host WordPress.

Considerations:

• WordPress is free as in "freedom of speech". WordPress is the standard in open and free blogging. It's very big and enjoys a large community to develop and support the platform.
• The WordPress.com brand has credibility. It was initiated and is managed by people very close to WordPress.org. One may assume that they all share the vision on free and open software which underpins WordPress.org. That vision entails, among other things, a credible level of quality and continuity, as well as clarity that the bloggers will own their own data, now and in the future.
• Most of the features available via WordPress.com are for free, as in "free beer".
• For a reasonable fee, domain mapping can be purchased.
• TypePad's interface has been slow lately. I hope that WordPress.com will be lighter and faster.
• Lately I've come across several features I would have liked to add on to my blog, but couldn't do it in my current setup with TypePad. Notably:
  • Disqus
  • Ping.fm
  • More flexible blog post footers, e.g. to include ShareThis, Ping this, etc.
  • Even lighter and faster templates for mobile browsers? I actually don't know if this is available on WordPress. But it should be, so that we wouldn't need to add confusion with services like Winksite or Mofuse.
• Overall however, these things - i.e. switching to another platform - usually take more time and are more cumbersome than one would wish for.
• I fear that the permalinks of my blog posts on TypePad may get messed up even after domain mapping on WordPress.com.
• It remains to be seen if all of the features that I'm currently running on TypePad will indeed be available on WordPress.com. On the other hand, I must admit that, having followed some of my heroes quite intensively lately - Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Dave Winer, among others - I have become more appreciative of simplicity in layout and faster download times (especially over a mobile phone). I may actually do away with some of the bells and whistles currently running on my blog.
• I especially like following Dave Winer's blog on the mobile interface, because it's light and fast and he has these collapsable blog post titles. Wonder if that's a feature available on WordPress...
• In my experience, TypePad has a very professional and responsive support service team, easily available for questions through the user interface. It remains to be seen how well user support works on WordPress's forums.
• Unfortunately, CSS Editing is a premium feature and doesn't come for free. But, as mentioned above, this is probably not a biggy. If it turns out I really need them, I'll pay.

Note to self: after going through the switch, update my blog post from August 21, 2007: "If you were to start blogging today..."

Ping this!

"If you were to start blogging today..."

Once in a while I get this question:

"If you were to start blogging today, which blogging platform, software and/or hosting service would you use?"

The answer isn't necessarily straightforward. In general, it depends on:

1. Which features are most important to you as a blogger;
2. How design-savvy and how tech-savvy you are, and how much you want to tweak by yourself.

I drew up an Excel sheet to compare some of the blogging services that I've used, on some of the criteria that I personally find most relevant.

The solutions in the comparison are:

• Vox, SixApart's third-party branded, community blogging service that allows you to publish different content to different groups of people: public, friends, family, and just yourself.
• Blogger, the inventors of blogging, now part of Google.
• Blogsome, a hosted service running on WordPress, an open source blogging platform.
• WordPress, open source blogging platform which you can download and run on your own or hosted server.
• Moveable Type, by SixApart, blogging solution which you can download and run on your own or hosted server.
• Three service levels of Typepad, by SixApart.

The criteria for comparison which I looked at are:

• Branding
  • domain mapping
  • third-party branding
• Access control
  • distributed access
  • multiple authors
• Design
  • easy layout templates and customization
  • advanced, CSS editing
• Features
  • easy-to-use backend interface
  • moblogging
  • widgets
• Application control
  • running the blogging solution on you own or hosted server
• Pricing

In some cases, where I haven't got the latest information about specific features, I have insert a question mark ("?"). I'd love to receive feedback and will be happy to turn those question marks into plusses ("+") or minuses ("-"). Please do correct me if I'm wrong about any of the inserted values.

Sometimes it's easy to choose

By way of illustration, I think there are a few "easy" use cases (or ways to narrow down your selection):

a) If you are rather tech-savvy, i.e. if you know how to install and maintain software on your own or hosted server, you can probably narrow down your selection to WordPress and Moveable Type  (- or even Blogsome in case you don't care about domain mapping). If you're not tech-savvy, you can count WordPress and Moveable Type out.

b) If domain mapping is important to you, and you don't have the technical skill to run blogging software on your own or hosted server, you should probably consider TypePad Plus.

c) If you want advanced control over your blog's design (and you don't want to run your own server), you should probably consider Blogsome (without domain mapping) or TypePad Pro (with domain mapping).

d) If you don't mind third-party branding, you don't care too much about domain mapping, and you are looking to share different blog content with different groups of people (i.e. public, friends, family, or just yourself) in an online community setup, have a look at Vox.

e) If you don't care too much about domain mapping, and you are looking for a free blogging service, try Blogger or Blogsome. Both are very straightforward and user friendly. Blogsome has a slightly richer feature set, including multiple authors and different access levels.

f) One reason to use TypePad basic, which is a paid service, rather than Blogger or Blogsome, is TypePad's customer service: the help ticketing system inside the blogging platform can be very useful.

Do you agree with my assessment? Can you help me fill in the gaps? Let me know!

"(...) It seems very simple when you see that you can have a web host and your name registered simultaneously. Numerous web hosting providers offer you to register your domain name with them at the time you do business with their company. It might sound great like registering cheapest domain name idea because of the convenience of getting everything done at once. But it is better to do domain name registration by your-self because this shows clearly who owns the name. There are many companies like godaddy which give domain buy service to their clients along with web design services. These services are also provided by wireless internet service providers. But to connect the internet they need to install wireless internet booster and give free wifi hotspot through which people can access the internet. (...)"