This is my first post in my WordPress blog. I signed up at wordpress.com and got one. My first blog was at blogspot.com, which is run by blogger.com. That was my first taste of blogging, and it took me a long time to get used to the idea of jotting down my thoughts on occasion.
Shortly after I signed up there, I realized that blogging could create really interesting interrelationships and distributed dialogs… but not with the blogger service.Blogger doesn’t support trackbacks, which means, essentially, that aside from comments people make locally to your blog, it’s a pretty one-way service. The only other interaction a user might have with the site would be to use a feed aggregator, or find my post on some aggregated site. Dave Harding (blog link on the right) recently asked if he could put my blog feed on gnujersey.org. I don’t care where my blog winds up, so I gave him the go ahead. Then I realized that even though I don’t care where my thoughts land, Dave probably didn’t want me talking about my pathetic pool game on his primarily-Linux-oriented site.
The solution to this problem? Categories! Just create a category called “Linuxâ€, put all of your Linux posts there, and then send Dave the link to the feed for that category. Easy, right? Again, not with the blogger service. It doesn’t support any notion of categories. So finally, after almost 18 months of blogging, I’m making a slightly more educated decision about the blog software I use, and I’ve chosen wordpress.
Don’t get all happy. WordPress is no dream either. It’s taken forever just to get this post to go live and have it look like it’s supposed to. Instead of using paragraph tags, paragraphs are defined using div tags, which apparently doesn’t imply anything about spacing between paragraphs, because there were none at first. Also, categories, which is what I switched for, didn’t work right either. After mucking around between last night and this morning, I finally happened to stumble upon a working category configuration. I’m scared to death to add another one, though. More features… more bugs.
My conclusion with regard to blog software is this: All blog software packages suck, some just give you more features for putting up with their suckiness.