Moved my thoughts from blogspot to wordpress..
I am kind of feeling sad and also frustrated because I had to leave my previous blog area which was in blogger.com.
The reason for moving to wordpress is very simple.. it is not blocked by my ISP. Refer to my previous post – GOI out of mind – blocking blog sites
I still had the option of seeing my blog through proxies like PKBlogs. But it was kind of frustrating to update my post and then go thru PKBlogs to see the post. Also I could not distribute my blog URL to most people in India because I wasn’t sure if it was blocked by their ISP as well. So I decided to move from blogspot. I still maintain my family blog on blogspot.
Moving to wordpress had been a boon in one way. I like the features in wordpress which I felt were missing in blogspot (Correct me if I am wrong). So let me explain what i liked about wordpress.
Importing from other blogs. This has been one primary reason why I could move to wordpress. Otherwise it would have been a though job copy pasting post from blogspot. It would be impossible for someone who has hunders of blogs accumulated over years. This is one good feature that wordpress folks have thought of.
Exporting the wordpress blog to a file. Now this is something which is very useful. Though wordpress is hosting my blogs, I would still be unsure if they would maintain my blogs forever. So this feature lets me export my blogs to a wordpress file format. But beware, this file could only be imported by anyother site hosting wordpress blog software. But thats fine with me. I can one day host my own blog site where I can import by blogs there.
Sidebar Widgets. Now this is something easily do’able in wordpress. I am sure we could manually edit the template in blogspot to had whatever we want in the sidebar, but wordpress has them as a readily addable components. This is very useful for layman blogger who doesn’t know much of HTML editing. But I wish the folks at wordpress keep adding more of the sidebar widgets to the existing collection.
Categories. Wow man.. this is one reason why I had to maintain seperate blogs in blogspot. Folks using blogspot, forgive me if I was unable to locate such an option in blogspot. In wordpress I can start categorizing the post. And a person visiting this blog could easily filter the post which are of his interest by clicking the respective category.
Pages. This is cool. I can now add static web pages to my blog. For example, the About page lets me brief about myself. Similarly I can have static web pages for anything I want, for example, a page containing my resume. And a person can leave his comments on these pages as well, like those for posts.
Inserting links. This I felt was never easy in blogspot for somereason. In wordpress, I easily select the text which needs to be a hyperlink and then click on the chain icon in the toolbar above. This gives me a pop-up where I enter the hyperlink, tool tip to be displayed and an option of wheather to open the link in the same page or another in an other windows of the browser.
Multiple blogs in the same user account. Yes you can do this. Initially I thought that we could not do this and thats where blogspot had the advantage. But I just figured out on how to create multiple blogs in the same user account. After you have logged into wordpress.com, just type out the blog address you want in the address bar. If that URL is not available (used by someone else) then you will visit that URL directly. In case the URL is available for you to be used, then you get a form which you need to fill up and thats it.. you have your new blog. After you have created more than one blog in the same user account, you will see two dashboards. In my case, I have a second blog on linux under the same user account.
I am still exploring my wordpress blog to see what other options are there and how it differentiates itself from blogspot. I shall be updating this blog as and when I find a nice feature which was missing in blogspot.
