(“Hello, O World!”)
Here it is, the new blog design on WordPress. Just look at all the features! Built-in comments that don’t suck! An attractive and incredibly elaborate default design! Categories! And much, much more!
So, what do you think?
Comments won’t be moderated unless spam becomes a problem. User registration isn’t required, but you can register if you want to feel super-cool.
Looks good, indeed. Glad you are enjoying it. The idea of having categories is compelling. I have sometimes wished I had them. I am wondering what ultimately caused you to decide on WordPress? Did you have a chance to demo it? (I guess it would not have been as difficult for you to do that, seeing that you already had your website hosted)
Categories, and plugins, and lots of neat templates (though none that I liked were as packed with features as the default)… mmmmm…
I decided to try WordPress because it’s used by several other blogs whose style I like. I did indeed demo it for a few weeks. I was going to try a much more customized template, but like I said, the default one is just so nice.
Wordpress does offer free hosting, like Blogger and Typepad do, but I had my own hosting, and it was really easy to set up. I just had to make a database, download the WP files, configure one file to connect to the database, and upload them to the folder on my server. Then I went to the blog address, and it automagically walked me through setup. The admin stuff is easy and powerful, and there are tons of templates (a bunch here, for example) and plugins available (like the quote thingy at the bottom, or the thingy that recognizes spam and sends it to me for moderation).
The only thing I don’t like so far is that I can’t control the order in which my links lists are printed. That is, there’s a manager for your lists of links that stores URLs, names, descriptions, how they’re printed, etc. My lists are “Catholic Blogs,” “Catholic Sites,” “Currently Reading,” etc. I can change how the contents of the lists are printed out, but the lists themselves come out in alphabetical order. I’ll probably have to do some PHP work if I want to change that, as it’s part of the WordPress code, not just part of the template’s code.
LOL. Also, the magical spam plugin caught my first comment as spam. But it can be taught.
It all really does look a whole lot better than Blogger (not knocking Blogger – well, maybe I am
) – I guess with Blogger you do get a reasonable page load speed considering it is free. With a free WP account I don’t think the same can be said.
One thing that I noticed and thought was really cool is that I can use an RSS feed for comments as well – If that works like I think it does, It would be less work to keep up with an interesting post and all the comments too.
Yeah. HaloScan offers an RSS feed for comments, but it’s only listed on the HaloScan account’s admin page. If Blogger offers comments RSS, I’ve never seen it.