The First Rant…!!
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Technology, Uncategorized
Now, some of you might think, why all this just for a blog? Wasn’t Wordpress.com good enough? What was the need for me to take a few pains to move my blog out to a personal webhost, get a domain registered, plus do a small plugin/theme hunt and few other tasks on top of that as well..?? The answer wouldn’t really be as simple as 42, the elaborate rant begins…
1. Claustrophobic Feel of Wordpress.com…
Wordpress as a free blogging site is infact a pretty cool thing. Has a vast developer community, has frequent updates, very very innovative features, cool themes added on a periodic basis, plus a very strong stable pro-blogging foundation. The problem comes with the way Wordpress restricts its users and removes the same restriction on payment of money. At times, it behaves like Yahoo! mail. You want to edit your theme and add your own widget? 10$ per annum! Just upgrade your space from a pitiable 50Mb, to a not-so-big 1Gb? 10$ an year! Or just to use the plugins of your choice? Forget it, Wordpress itself tells you to get out!
Unlike Blogger, which offers CSS editing, freedom to FTP stuff into it, gives no restriction in storing images and stuff, also allows you to add a domain of your own all for no cost, Wordpress does get hungry for money at times making me feel both stupid and claustrophobic in front of my pals who blog with blogger and self hosted sites. I couldn’t even add advertisements (not that I wanted but still, I need to rant here!), a few uncommon scripted widgets, although Wordpress allowed some of the more popular to be added with intuitive drag and drop interface. But still, it gave a me a wierd feeling of being controlled.
2. Hey, this skin looks cool, Can I try it? NO!
Wordpress.com (free service) has a selection of good, abysmal and not-my-type skins. The good ones are used by everyone, the bad ones are an eye-sore, the not-my-type skins are definitely not for me as I would like my blog to look the way I want it to. The wordpress theme development community is the largest of its kind and just browsing through the different sites, would easily get any non-fussy person a collection of 42 themes of his taste. Wordpress themes are well commented, community assisted, and nicely split into separate sections for the header, footer, etc etc… which give WYSIWYG-ers like me a small advantage when it comes to editing the themes.
The bad part is, Wordpress.com users can’t access that uber-cool resource. Same with plugins too, you have some very clever ones around, and Wordpress.com only gives those which it feels like giving and acts generous after that. What about the tons of plugins that it hasn’t been giving?
3. Good service, or No service?
Wordpress.com offers excellent service to those who aren’t really keen on running the plugins/themes that they want, and in all, are pretty much satisfied with what these guys ‘generously give away’. I wanted some more control, a little bit more flexibility. Wordpress isn’t really cooperative in that regard. Despite all that I got by being a free Wordpress.com user, I wanted some more… but then, Wordpress wasn’t bad too…
Here comes Wordpress.org to the rescue. Wordpress actually started out as a blogging engine for self-hosted blogs like this one. It was relatively recent that they started the free blogging service. Wordpress.org v2.3 is the blogging CMS that is installed on the Dreamhost server that I use. Complete with well organised folders for the installation themes and plugins, SSH with Linux, and addons to make life easier, it makes blogging for a geek a wonderful experience. Now that I have got a custom domain registered with Go Daddy, I feel really free, and contented with the amount of control I have on things… What’s more, the blogging life hasn’t become harder, the interface for blogging and stuff still remains the same or better, with the user friendly plugins I installed. The best part is, Wordpress no more tags around with LuminaR… Now, my blogger counterparts have every reason to be envious! As for the Wordpressers, ‘You guys made a nice choice by coming here, but think about going up now…’
The import was a breeze and I didn’t lose anything whether it was the blogroll, posts, comments, tags, drafts and what not! One thing that I lost was my Google Page Rank, about which I don’t give a šhìt! That thing will come up on itself soon enough. I would have to add in the new plugins myself, which means 2-3 extra clicks. I don’t mind it, considering the fact that I can edit plugins too… And readers, Uma and I are gonna put up content better than what you have ever seen from us here. This marks a raise in LuminaR standards, after all, domain ka paisa bhi toh wasool karna hai!
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2 Responses to “The First Rant…!!”
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Ankur Banerjee Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 1:38 amYou can’t FTP stuff into Blogger - rather, Blogger can FTP stuff into some other webhost. So the Blogger engine will reside on Google’s servers, while the content can be on your own servers.
Also, Blogger DOES restrict the amount of images you can put up - there’s a limit of 1 GB. Actually, it can be much lesser, because what it does is that it uploads the stuff to you PicasaWeb account. In case you HAVE photos on PicasaWeb, that will eat into your Blogger account share. Not a big deal for most people, but if you have a photo blog, it hurts pretty soon.
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Prashanth Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 3:17 amAny day, 1Gb is 20 times better than 50Mb… Wordpress makes you feel the pinch if you are just a casual blogger within a month if it was not for GooglePages, where I hosted all my pictures…
