25th
Blog Software
I’ve been thinking for a while about blogging seriously, but never made it past figuring out what blogging software to use. In the past, I’ve used WordPress, both self-hosted and of the WordPress.com variety, and I’ve written my own. Writing my own blogging software was a fun exercise, but I always spend more time fiddling with the software instead of actually writing.
After working with both my own blog software, and hosting WordPress myself, I’ve come to the realization that I really have no interest in maintaining blog software. I enjoy writing the software, but not the day-to-day maintenance, update installation, etc. There’s always something more interesting than blog software that I could be doing.
I looked at hosting on WordPress.com. I knew I wanted more than what they offered for free, and I was willing to pay for the simple features I wanted, like a custom domain, templates, and no advertising.
The WordPress Premium Features page is, incidentally, kind of annoying. It’s nice looking, but buries the prices for the various upgrades at the end of paragraph-long descriptions.
Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t support custom templates, only custom CSS. While you can certainly do a lot with CSS customization, it doesn’t offer the flexibility of markup customization. I can understand why they don’t offer it—the WordPress template system is PHP based—but it makes spending $14.97 yearly to customize only the CSS seem kind of silly.
So WordPress.com isn’t quite what I’m looking for.
I’ve been using Tumblr for a while, but mostly as an aggregator of my other feeds from Twitter, Delicious, and flickr. It’s always worked well for what I’ve used it for, and it allows template customization. For free. I’m planning on starting to keep my actual blog here, in addition to the snippets from elsewhere.
The simplicity of the Tumblr interface is appealing to me, especially compared with WordPress, which—while polished—has always seemed a little busy to me. I can easily imagine paying for the service, and I probably will, if it ever becomes and option.
