CT Biz Blogs

The popular blogging application, WordPress, now has a free, hosted version. This is perfect for folks who don’t want to concern themselves with getting a web hosting provider and messing about with domains and such.

It’s been out about a month, and I finally took a look.

It’s very easy to get a blog; you simply go to www.wordpress.com (as opposed to the .org domain for the version you can host yourself). There, you enter a name for your blog, which becomes the first part of the URL – in my case, it’s (what else) http://ctbizblogs.wordpress.com. (Read my views on having your domain name.)

Registration is a two-step process – first you enter your blog name (which becomes your username) and an email address. You’re then sent the password in email. This differs from Blogger, where you can create a blog and start posting in one step. I’m sure WordPress does it this way to make it harder for spammers to set up blogs.

The user interface is very straightforward, with tabs for the major sections of the system. Anything that doesn’t seem completely obvious at first will become so when you click on a tab. It’s very easy to learn by exploring.

There are a limited number of themes (templates for the look of the blog) – and you can’t edit them, the way you can with Blogger, or with the host-your-own version of WordPress. For example, I have moved all the sidebar elements in this blog from where they were in the original template. You can’t do that in the hosted WordPress application. As with everything in life, the trade off is between simplicity and control.

The interface for writing postings is very nice – a “rich editor,” (WYSIWYG.) This is much easier for folks who aren’t familiar with HTML, or who are, but are lazy (that’d be me). In fact, I want to know why this isn’t the default on the version you can host yourself.

One feature that makes this a better choice than Blogger, is that WordPress supports categories. This helps you organize your archived posts into topics, and also (say the experts) improve your ranking in search engine results.

You can also add others to your blog, as authors or as editor, contributor, or subscriber. This is because WordPress is not just for public blogs, but can be used as a CMS (content management system) for managing information for a variety of other uses. It can be made completely private, with password protection at several levels, so that only subscribers can access the content.

WordPress.com comes with a comment spam filter called Akismet. You can also hold comments for moderation, so that nothing will appear on the blog until you’ve had a chance to approve it.

WordPress.com will give you

• Control over comments
• Categories
• Control over sidebar links such as blog rolls
• Control over who can read your posts

It won’t give you:

• control over your theme.

I think that’s a decent trade-off, and if I were getting into blogging today, I think I’d go with WordPress.com over Blogger.