Moved to WordPress

Alright so I’m a little slow…

Over the past several years I have used a few different blogging platforms. I am not a huge blogger. However, when I do get thoughts or ideas, and I want to write them down, I do like to have something that is flexible. A platform that allows me to be creative. After using Blogger and even Microsoft, I became a Typepad user for a number of years. Typepad was very easy to set up and it allowed me to easily add videos and images. My first exposure to WordPress was not very positive. It was not very flexible and it was cumbersome to add images.

Some colleagues of mine were singing the praises of WordPress to me recently. So I thought I would give it another try. I knew that there we many organizations offering hosted WordPress solutions. However, since I already had an account with 1and1.com I thought I would download a copy and try my luck installing my own hosted version.

The results were great. WordPress is very easy to install. 1and1.com even had a simple step by step FAQ for installing it on one of their servers. There are countless themes, widgets and plugins out there for free so it was very easy for me to be creative with the platform. I also really like that WordPress has a built in code editor so I can edit PHP and CSS files on the actual site templates right in the admin screen.

After I installed the platform a security update came out forcing me to upgrade after only a week of up time. Even the architecture and the way the system handles upgrades is very well thought through. I was able to upgrade with almost zero downtime.

All in all, I was always happy with Typepad. They have a very nice, supported platform. I also liked Blogger. It was very easy to use. I even liked my little Microsoft Sharepoint blog…lots of flexibility. WordPress seems to have all of this in a nicely matured open source platform that continues to grow in popularity and support.

I am not sure if I recommend that everyone downloads and installs their own copy of this platform. For me, a $10/month 1and1.com hosting subscription did the trick. For some, it might be easier to check out http://www.wordpress.org or http://www.wordpress.com and take a look at their hosted solutions. Either way, WordPress is the platform I recommend for blogging and more.