Thursday, July 07, 2005

Site update: WTF? Suggestions?

Okay, Nate's right, Blogger's headed south on me, and I need to switch to a more reasonable hosting service. Until I do, though, this simpler template seems not to screw up my raggedy-ass HTML in the sidebar, so we'll run with it for now. It's perhaps time to ditch Blogger, though.

What do folks suggest? Moveable Type, Typepad, Wordpress, what's best? I've heard gripes and praise for each. I'm a writer, not a webmaster, at heart, so I don't really want to spend a LOT of time managing the thing.


Which is what makes Blogger such an amazing free service, huh? I mean, how many folks, myself included, first started a blog because it's literally just 1-2-3 easy? I sometimes see disdainful comments about Blogger's functionality compared to commonly used pay-per services, but I'm not bitter. I'm grateful for the chance to take the "new media" out for a spin to see how it handles, while maintaining ridiculously low overhead. It's part of what let me do this much writing as a side project -- it may not pay, but it doesn't cost me much. Still, given my level of use, I obviously need some better tools around here.

4 comments:

Catonya said...

Hi Scott-

I use WordPress 1.5. My site host is BlueHost. Both get an A+. I recently installed a copy of TextPattern on my space as I've heard great things about it -and something about it being illegal to post spam on TP sites though I can't find the article about that at the moment. :s

Spammers hit the WP sites hard from what I hear. I kinda think the more you talk about spam on your site the harder you're hit because I've only had maybe 50 spam comments since day one and I don't talk about spam on my site. Others I know get 500 spam comments a day.

Free hosting for WP blogs is here -WP is already installed so you can take it for a test drive.

The themes option in the latest WP is pretty cool. There are literally over a hundred themes to choose from. Those pre-installed at blogsome can be seen here.

If you have any questions, let me know - I may not be able to answer, but can probably point you to someone who can.

Hope this helps.
Cat

Unknown said...

TypePad's hosted, like Blogger, so you don't have to install any software or manage a server, and you can use lots of features Blogger doesn't have, like categories, photo albums, TrackBacks, and custom style. Plus TypePad can import all your entries directly.

Anonymous said...

If you figure it out, let me know. I've been thinking to switching to a real domain myself. I'm afraid it's too complicated for me without help and I don't have any here in NC.

I'll be interested in knowing if it's doable for a technoidiot like me.

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