WHY I SWITCHED TO WORDPRESS

September 28, 2009

Gregg as well as Dale were wondering since you switched blogging platforms from Squarespace to Wordpress.

If you were not wondering, you should stop celebration of a mass now.

Here’s what I’m you do with Wordpress which was impossible with Squarespace, even after steady appeals to their tech support.

Comment spam management. I get in between 5 as well as twenty spam comments per day, as well as it’s been increasing. Squarespace has no await for automatically flagging viewable spam (like contains a word “Cialis”), regulating blacklist sites, or CAPTCHA. Wordpress not usually has all these options, though facilities similar to “Moderation required, unless a criticism by this user has already been approved.”
Awesome criticism system. The improved a criticism complement a improved a conversations. I’ve pronounced before which I magnitude a “success” of this blog by a peculiarity of a comments. When a comments spin out a post, when people disagree with me as well as any other, when a points in a comments have been stronger than a post, that is success, since we’re all guidance as well as growing, together with me.In Squarespace you had no carry out over a sore commenting system. I longed for threaded conversations during a least, though perfectly you wish Gravatars, a “recent comments” sidebar widget (to serve prerogative those who stick upon a conversation), as well as compelling my commenter’s own blog posts automatically (more reward).Yes, you could have switched to DISQUS or Echo, though afterwards you would have mislaid all my existent comments. (Had this been a only complaint with Squarespace, you would have substantially usually used a single of those systems as well as pronounced “oh well” to a existent comments.)
Full backup. Squarespace lets you behind up posts as well as comments though not a files you’ve uploaded (i.e. images). Now which I’m hosting Wordpress myself, I’m right away subsidy up a complete complement to Amazon S3 every day or on-demand.
Speed. My stream Wordpress designation serves pages three times faster than my Squarespace site. That’s not trivial.
Site design. Wordpress has “infinite” carry out over your theme. As you can see, you didn’t shift a total lot yet, though for e.g. see a new home page layout with dual columns, a summaries, as well as a thumbnail images. I similar to a leisure to do some-more in future.
Automating amicable media buttons. Similar to “layout,” though right away articulate about code as well as not usually blueprint as well as graphics, I’ve created law formula which automates things similar to those “Retweet” buttons upon a post, as well as emits them in a opposite approach in a RSS feed. Before you had to have those buttons manually, as well as even afterwards it didn’t crop up in a RSS feed!
RSS control. Besides those buttons, there’s things similar to special formatting or a footer for a RSS feed which you couldn’t do in Squarespace. For example, upon a site a

tab has an orange line down a left side, though in a RSS feed it didn’t, which equates to you couldn’t communicate a same meaning. For example, infrequently you usually score calm though a orange club — in a feed you can’t discuss it a difference! Now I’ve combined formula which does this in a feed too.
SEO control. I can right away carry out all about a post — title, URL, meta-description, etc.. With Squarespace you can’t. Besides losing out upon a little SEO, alternative widgets as well as toolbars (social media await systems) collect up upon those things too. In Squarespace, a pretension was so screwed up it even had damaged SGML characters as well as irregular characters which screwed up those systems.
Sandbox. When you wish to try a brand brand new blueprint or a brand brand new plug-in or whatever, you competence mangle a site. With Wordpress, you have a book which utterly duplicates a stream blog (files as well as database) in to a sandbox. Then you can screw it up, as well as usually after I’m confident with a changes do you request it to a genuine blog.
One site to order them all. Currently you do not have anything upon this site solely a blog as well as a about me page. But in destiny which will expected shift (whether or not it’s essentially advertised in a menubar). With Wordpress, this is not usually easy, though a alternative pages can be “anything” if you need them to be — even usually capricious PHP, even though e.g. a sidebar. Since this is my de facto personal website, that’s critical to me.
Community support. There’s 7.5 million Wordpress blogs, so there’s lots of report upon a web if you get stuck.

The downsides to self-hosted Wordpress have been:

Have to conduct a server. (For me you have to conduct a server any way for alternative reasons, so this isn’t so bad).
MySQL out of mental recall errors. A well known complaint in Wordpress; I’ve run in to this a couple of times. Long story, though hopefully is solved now.
Future scalability. Right right away scalability isn’t a regard — I’ve tested it with collection as well as it’s fine, as well as you can enlarge a energy of my practical horde usually by spending some-more income — though if it ever were, which would take work. The work is flattering obvious, e.g. regulating a CDN for immobile content, regulating nginx for caching as well as front-ending mixed Apache servers, etc., though it’s still genuine work.

But geeks similar to me suffer screwing with servers, so you lend towards to spin a blind eye to a downsides…

Why not Typepad or MoveableType or something else? Because you knew Wordpress would work, so you didn’t worry looking.

P.S. Proper post up tomorrow.