I’ve always been told to avoid Wordpress.

“It’s buggy, slow, bloated, broken, eats babies, and voted for Bush!” say the naysayers.

So I used Serendipity, and was pretty happy with it.  One of the things that drew me to Serendipity was the simplicity of the theming system.  It just used Smarty… as opposed to Wordpress’ massive horrible butchered PHP pieces template system (as I saw it).

But frankly, I was a bit underwhelmed with Serendipity.  It’s highly possible I just didn’t try hard enough, but it seemed that if you wanted to go even slightly away from “post to a blog” it was just… armtwisting.  Even adding “pages” required going to my plugins and opening the plugin editor… it just felt really hacky.

Then I started working on Missing Number Comics I got my hands on the Webcomic plugin for Wordpress.  I hadn’t found a similar solution for Serendipity or Drupal (the CMS that runs Gamium), so I felt that the Computing Gods could give me an indulgence or something.

And what I learned… was that Wordpress is AWESOME.  Maybe it’s a sin to say so, but it’s great.  After installing Fluency Admin 2 and setting Google Gears to “Turbo” the admin interface… it’s FAST.  And CLEAN.  And can upgrade itself.  And allows you to make pages right in the interface!  And with Webcomic, it puts extra editing info right on the admin pages.

And… well, I was right about the themes.  They ARE hacky butchered PHP pieces.  But even that’s not so bad, because I’m not the first to notice the theming system.  I got hold of Thematic… and I swear, I had this theme done in an hour.  And that includes graphics time!  Just add a bit of CSS, and blammo!  I never had to look at the hacky PHP.

There’s only one downside to this switch:  I used Wordpress’ RSS feed import, with an RSS pulled from my old blog… and it’s full of HTML code.  Which Wordpress happily converted to HTML entities.  So now I get to go through and fix all my entries so they act as code instead of DISPLAY AS code.  But even that’s not so bad, in the long view.

So, long story short:  It’s Wordpress for me now.  I’ve been seduced by the dark side, and they have cake.

Anyone who’s tried to write a blog hits a point where all the easy daily topics have been done, and it’s been days (or weeks!) since you’ve last updated, and you’re staring at the blog going, OMG OMG OMG my four fans are going to remove my blog from their feedreader!  I have to add something!

When that happens, you get filler.  Like this entry from the Innerlayer at SoftLayer:

A Blog is a strong commitment. I mean, if you just set up a web page, it’s obvious that you’re going to update occasionally, maybe once or twice a month, add a new page or two. I’ve seen viable websites that haven’t been updated since before Y2K. But it’s OK, because it’s a website. Not so with a blog! If you set up a blog engine*, you’re not allowed to make just one or two updates a month. You have to keep the pump primed with awesome content.

Most of this just has to do with the design of a blog engine. For one, each post is stamped with a date. The assumption seems to be that if you have a date on something, the date is important. The date on a carton of milk tells you when to drink it by, so maybe the date on a blog post is also some kind of content expiration date? The assumption seems to be that dates on text mean that you want people to notice the date and act upon it. Not to mention that most blog engines have some kind of calendar that points to listings of posts by date. If you have a calendar widget that only has one or two days highlighted, the assumption is you don’t care about your blog or something.

Again, it’s not any kind of failure, it’s just what’s expected. Blogs all look similar: they have a home page of posts, which link to full post pages. Pages are tagged for quick taxonomy identification and grouping. Blogs also generally allow comments, upping the conversational angle. So you have to keep your blog pumping content. I’ve discovered three different schemes of blog content generation:

The Panic Morning News: The Panic Morning News is a strategy where a blogger panics, struggling to create content every day. What you end up with is some content which is well written, and some content that seems to be filler, designed to put something up to fill this day’s update.

The Anything Goes Times: These are the blogs where you find incredibly boring posts about accounting suddenly appearing in between exciting posts. I’m not saying that accounting is boring, per se, more that suddenly discovering a post about accounting sandwiched between a post about video games and exploding cars sticks out. Of course, these blogs generally are a kind of string of consciousness blogs, where the blogs are more of a “What am I thinking now” type blog.

The Who Cares Star-Telegram: These are the trailblazers who don’t care that you think they’re lame for having only one or two posts a month. Their posts are well written, and it becomes obvious that, to them, a blog is more a Content Management Engine* than a two-way communication medium.

But this isn’t just a blogging phenomenon… it happens with anything that updates daily. Comic strips and books, websites, news feeds. And filler content usually follows some kind of pattern. For comics, a comic/cartoon character is usually put into a silly situation for a day. Batman has a birthday party thrown by Joker and the Penguin, or Naruto goes on a tangent about ramen noodles for a whole episode. Blogs and Webcomics tend to have their own special type of ‘filler,’ usually they have a whole update talking about how difficult it is to write blogs and/or webcomics.

* NOTE: If you want the convenience of a blog without the expectations of daily updates, look at making a wiki or use a Content Management System like Drupal.

Originally posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at http://theinnerlayer.softlayer.com/2008/writing-a-blog-is-hard/

The correct response is… but why?  Isn’t the Serendipity Control panel good enough for you?  Huh?  Huh?

And Windows Live Writer?  Like, from Microsoft?

At this point, friends of mine would be well within their rights to pick up the phone and call the local mental institution.  I hear they give rewards.

No, I haven’t gone loony.  A while back, I installed the Windows 7 Beta (more about that in future posts), and decided that, in order to “do the beta right,” I really needed to use Microsoft software when there was a viable Microsoft solution.  I therefore ended up with the Microsoft Live Suite.

Just about every other program in the suite is rubbish.  Pretty, but rubbish.  I don’t need a local photo organizer, the email software simply isn’t Gmail… etc, etc, etc.  I found no use for any of the tools…

…except for Live Writer.

Using the MovableType API interface for blogging, Windows Live Writer detects my Serendipity blog, downloads the theme (even if it blows up humorously inside), and lets me just write.

It’s WYSIWYG (a word I learned from an old Windows 3.1 demo movie from 1991), so no juggling with markdown, or BBCODE, or HTML… nope, I just strike “control+I” and I have italics.  Not that I have a problem with markup for documents;   I make a living writing markup.  It’s just nice to have a WYSIWYG tool that’s just there, waiting to help me do basic markup.

But here’s my favorite feature:

OMG!  Just add a picture in the program, and Windows Live Writer resizes it, converts it, ads a bit of pizzaz to it, and I’m done!  No round trips through Serendipity’s Media Browser, no separate upload phases… I just say “Put me a picture there my good man,” and it puts me a picture there!  (On the other hand, you can see it breaking all over my blog’s theme… something to work on.)

So, yeah.  I see myself using this program alot.  It’s more responsive than multiple PHP powered forms over the internet, doesn’t suffer from lag, I can save both local and server drafts, I have a spellchecker installed, can insert media with no sweat at all… it just streamlines it so well.

(Note:  I discovered whilst writing this entry that the word “Microsoft” is in the spell checker.  Huh.  How about that?)