Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you who have been here before may have noticed a small change in the appearance of this blog. Ok, a large change. For about five years, almost since I started blogging, I’ve been using a blogging host provider called Blog City. BC has served me very well over the years, but it was time I moved on.

I originally chose BC when there weren’t any really mature blogging platforms, and BC had just as many if not more features than many of its competitors. Also the idea of setting up my own blogging software and having to tweak it at that time, while not a big deal, seemed like enough of a nuisance to at least be a factor in my decision.

Over the years, BC came out with new functionality, new widgets, and whole new administrative platforms. The amount of personal attention was also great. They are still a good choice for a segment of the blogging or potentially-blogging community.

Still, there are a few things that have motivated me to move to Wordpress, and I finally made the jump, after lots of prep work on the back end over the last month or so. I am still a relative newbie at Wordpress and will be continuing to add new content and functionality, tweaking the look of things, etc., etc., over the next few weeks or even months. But I believe with this new blogging software will help motivate me to get back into the rhythm of blogging, even if it’s just to post a link and a short paragraph here and there as I come across something interesting and want to share my thoughts.

For those of you who don’t know much about blogging, Wordpress is an open-source application that one can install on a huge number of hosts out there. You can easily take your entire blog, save it to your local computer, then reimport all that content on a new host if you decide to go from one to another. The software stays the same. The software is also very easy to use, with lots of customization via “plugins” and “themes” to change the look and add functionality. There are lots of these available for free, plus you can program your own if you are so inclined, or just tweak the ones that are available. Some of these plugins are extremely powerful, adding very significant new functionality. Since the software is open-source, it will never go away due to a company going out of business or switching tactics, and becuase it is so popular, your data is in a format that can be imported into many other software platforms if you ever choose a different one. And if it isn’t now, chances are that some developer will create a migration tool for such a huge market.

Its popularity as well as the open-source nature of WordPress ensures many advantages, as well as a few small burdens which other blogging platforms, especially ones that do your hosting for you as well, do not. For anyone with technical savvy, such software is a pretty obvious choice, although like I did five years ago, you might decide on a solution that avoids the added work of installing and configuring such software simply due to time constraints and a busy life. WordPress does have a fully-hosted version as well, similar to Blogger and Blog-City, and like the others it comes in both free and paid, more premium versions. If you ever want to get a feel for these different software platforms, the best place to start would be to create one of these free accounts on the various choices and play to see which one fits your style best.