For a really long time I did not blog here on wordpress.com, much more favoring my self-hosted blog (3th). Having an espresso at Starbucks in Vienna, though, opens up your mind for new ideas like using wordpress.com again…
Just a short notice: I am posting from the other side of the world. Zoom out for better understanding.
First day of the South Pacific Island-Tour. A short flight from Vienna to London and a rather long flight from there to Los Angeles. A short note on the plane and the crew: Whenever you can, take Air New Zealand. I have never ever before experienced such a nice flight. The crew was great, the food was good, the entertainment system well equipped. Great flight. Not comparable to what happened at Air China…
Los Angeles
What a crazy city yet what a village it actually is. When I came to Los Angeles I expected a city like something between Washington and New York with a big southern touch. What I found is a huge village with the worst public transport ever, a centre that is no longer safe to walk at night and a touristy Hollywood with its Sunset Boulevard and other annoyances. However, I enjoyed the stay because the city actually was different. If you plan a visit there, learn Spanish. It opens a lot of doors that otherwise are closed.
Random happenings in L.A.
- Bus crashes into man. Man’s leg is broken (you can see the bones). Bus is standing on the man’s leg. Bus driver refuses to drive away because of insurance reasons!
- No cockroaches in the Hotel La Quinta.
Some time last week, Google expanded Google Earth with Google Sky. As fascinating as Google Sky is, that’s not the focus of this post. What I’m talking about is a flight simulator embedded within Google Earth.In a nutshell: Download the newest Google Earth and press Ctrl+Alt+A (Win) or Command+Option+A (Mac).
Google ads between your blog posts
We’ve heard your feedback about wanting to insert Google ads between your blog posts, and we’re happy to let you know that Blogger now supports this implementation through the AdSense widget. For more detailed instructions, please visit Blogger’s Help Center.
The last three months I was testing out WordPress, a service similar to Blogger. I really like the WordPress-CMS and I love how the guys at WordPress come up with new and sometimes even usefull things every two weeks. Having a blog on WordPress means having a full featured website with dynamic and static pages that works very well with search engines like Google. If you write an article in WordPress.com, it is for sure available on Google-searches just half an hour later if not even faster. WordPress, however, lacks of some features (and vice versa) I would like to mention here in comparison to Blogger.
Customization of layout
- Blogger: for free, endless possibilities.
- WordPress: $10/year, only CSS.
Domain mapping
- Blogger: for free.
- WordPress: $10/year.
Statistics
- Blogger: no.
- WordPress: included.
Advertisements
- Blogger: AdSense included, all others possible.
- WordPress: not allowed.
Storage quota
- Blogger: 1024MB. Upgrades available ($20 for 6GB, $75 for 25GB, $250 for 100GB and $500 for 250GB per year).
- WordPress: 50MB. Upgrades available ($20 for 1GB, $50 for 5GB and $90 for 10GB per year).
Importing/Exporting
- Blogger: No importing. No exporting.
- WordPress: Importing available (from Blogger, Live Journal, Movable Type and TypePad and from other WordPress blogs). Exporting possible into the WordPress XML-format.
Conclusion
I can recommend both services. Although Blogger lacks some features, WordPress has included, it is still my primary choice. There is so much more “for free” here at Blogger that makes Blogger more interesting for the novice as well as for the advanced user.
Testing out both systems for 6 months makes me return to Blogger. It is easier to use, faster and more reliable than WordPress.
I am using Textpattern since Dean Allen published the first version of the program. Mainly as a blog, but for some business-related websites, its CMS-qualities are very usefull. However, I cannot clearly see where all this is going to. I have asked a similar question some time ago, but perhaps now things got clearer.
Blog?
TXP is great for blogs. One could argue that there are systems that deal better with blogs, especially WordPress is a great system if you do not want to fiddle around with themes, sections and so on and as far as I know, it will soon have genuine tagging-support, a feature that is only achievable with plugins now. (As in TXP.) So could we see TXP’s future as a blogging-tool together with many, many others? I don’t think, it will. All major web2.0-sites (I hate this term, yet everyone knows what I am talking about) do not include TXP in their blog-listings. Take flickr as an example: They list a lot of plattforms to blog to, TXP, however, is not there. The same with a lot of other web2.0-sites.
CMS for Professionals?
Is TXP the right choice when it comes to professional websites that do not deal with blog-like site-structures? I don’t know, but I would say no (although I use it a lot for such websites). On the one hand, TXP is too much focused on blog-like websites, on the other hand, it has the power to easily manage a small and also medium-sized website with ease as long as there are not too many subpages. Here also plug-ins can help, but if you look at TXP’s plugin-development, you can name a dozen active developers and about three times the amount of people more, who switched away from TXP.
Plugins
I had a look into WP and when returning back to TXP (I did it, because nothing beats the flexibility of the section-system), everything got quiet. Too quiet, to be honest. I am just an average user and somehow I have a strange feeling when looking at release dates and seeing that the last TXP-release was half a year ago. Many problems that are quite often mentioned in the forum are either ignored or of no urgency, however these problems include tagging and comment-spam (with which I have to deal with in the last weeks, too).
If you look at the plugins and especially their availability, you have most likely the following situation: One guy made a good plugin. If you visit his website, however, the bottom-line of this person’s blog already says “published with wordpress” and the plugin can be found somewhere in the archives with a new remark telling you that the future development of this plugin has been stopped.
Themes
One of the darkest chapters of TXP is the availability of themes. No matter whether themes are important or not – people use them as a basis or as an inspiration for their own themes. Also, newbie-users would profit much more if they could get an idea of the whole presentational-structure of TXP by examples. I invested much time in TXP and learned the whole thing by myself, but if I learned something from outside, it was by installing (well, if you can call this procedure installing) other’s themes.
Documentation
As long as I have used TXP in its basic english version, documentation, especially the question marks inside TXP were no problem at all. Now TXP can be used in German language (and many others), yet documentation sucks. Even some links from the textpattern.com site to wikis and so on are broken! This makes dealing with TXP really difficult for people who just started with it. Even for me, when looking for specific semantics, it is digging through one of the worst written documentations, therefore, the forum gives me much faster answers! (Also, the translation of the diagnostics into various languages, was a bad idea: The contents of the “Results” in the diagnostics tab should be in one language available only, this makes helping much more easy!)
And, something else: I think the splitting into various domains makes the whole thing really annoying. Keep it simple, somebody once said, and for me help.textpattern.com, wiki.textpattern.com etc. is simply easier to remember than various domains.
Development and Psychology
When I motivated people to start blogging (or to use websites and not sending me thousands of photos by e-mail… whatever), they rejected TXP simply because of its release date. WP is updated every month or at least every two months – was their argument. I myself install WP time to time, because I am really curious on what these guys added to their CMS. So how do TXP-developers deal with this and what are the plans for the future of TXP? Paid service? Blogging-Plattform? CMS for professional websites? Hum. Answers greatly appreciated.
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