Last year, I was vacillating between WP and Blogger as my blogging platform. You can see some of that here. With WP 2.7 coming out, I was tempted to try WordPress, finally this year I made the shift completely. As promised, here are my experiences with WP on my own hosting solution + domain.
You can also try this out on your <name>.wordpress.com blogs as well, but the real awesomeness comes out only with your own domain and hosting combination. Try it … it costs around Rs. 3000 odd, but definitely worth it!!
How to do it
Transferring from one platform to another was pretty simply. WP comes in with a very nifty import facility, wherein I could import all my Blogger posts with their comments (whew!). Then it was just a matter of changing the domain settings (this took more than a day to figure out!!).
Pros
The pros are the obvious ones –
- Completely customizable look and feel of the blog
- Readymade and re-usable themes and cool widgets that simply fit into your blog
- Hassle-free
- All plug-ins, widgets, themes and the platform itself auto-updates!! I don’t have to do any tinkering around :-)
- Huge, and I mean one mother of a huge community to contribute to this WP ecosystem
I could go on, but lets leave these for now. I like the platform but it does have its peeves.
Cons
- Categories and Tags … Tags and Categories … yeah, now I have to decide on one and do both … even if just one morphology works for me :-( … anyone have a hack for this?
- Now I have noticed that I keep on playing around with the platform more instead of writing more!!
Any help from you guys would be appreciated :)