Getting Used to Wordpress

Posted by Kristin Wenzel | 18 June 2006, 5:53 AMdigg this story add to delicious technorati

Filed Under Blog, Meta, Web Standards & Design

I’ve been running this site for five years, almost six, and I’m sick of manually maintaining something as complex as a blog - the tedious process of posting a new article to my site is the biggest deterrent from writing. And that’s when I remembered WordPress, which didn’t sound “fantastic” at the time, but I gave it a shot, anyhow.

So does it Rock, or Not?!

I really thought I’d hate WordPress. I honestly did. It looked like a combination of Blogger and LiveJournal. Now, I will own up to the fact that I’ve kept a LiveJournal for over five years, but I would also rather stick a fork in my eye than try and integrate LiveJournal with my site.

Okay, it rocks

I was WRONG. WordPress? It’s absolutely phenomenal. It validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict straight out of the box - no bull. You can make your own design OR use one of the tons of design templates available. And it’s FREE. No advertising whatsoever. I’m amazed.

OS X 10.4 Dashboard Widget Available

One of the biggest things I wanted to be able to do was post to my site without a hassle. WordPressDASH is a simple, easy-to-use dashboard widget that allows you to post from a small window in Dashboard. It’s already indespensible.

Mint-egration

It doesn’t stop there, either. I use Mint to monitor/analyze my web traffic, but it has a little trouble working with WordPress - I was going to be seriously bummed out, too, until I saw that someone had developed a WordPress Plugin Module that SPECIFICALLY is designed to integrate Wordpress and Mint - no hassle, no validation issues!

Seriously, it rocks

Really. WordPress really rocks hard. It’s free, you can’t beat that. It’s easy to install, easy to use, easy to set up and easy to customize. It’s standards compliant and fully functional. And fun! So expect to hear a lot more from me, I’m thrilled with how well this is working out!

2 Responses to “Getting Used to Wordpress”

  1. Jamie McIlroy Says:
    August 14th, 2006 at 10:26 am

    I agree with your take on WordPress, it’s pretty slick. Do you know if you can use a WordPress feed to update your LiveJournal? I’d like to use WordPress to post and let people that access my LJ read from their friends list (without having to manually add the WordPress feed).

    And yeah, I tried integrating my site with LJ…ended up using RSS and parsing my entries…worked alright but man, what a pain.

  2. Kristin Wenzel Says:
    August 14th, 2006 at 11:57 am

    Oh man, no, it’s SO easy to push to livejournal from WP.

    There’s a plugin for Wordpress called LJ Crossposter that works like magic. It’s SO easy.

    Basically when you isntall that plugin, every time you post to WP, you have the option of having it update your LJ with the same post.

    :)

    –Kristin

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