Wordpress is nifty...

I realize that bloggers talking about blogging is about as ‘inside-baseball’ as you can get. And using your third post ever to talk about the blogging platform you’re using is fairly hubristic, as well. But this is actually the sixth or seventh Wordpress blog that I’ve interacted with, over my career as a computer geek. I help several very nice ladies with their gardening blogs, and I’ve setup several WP instances for my sister (note that those blogs have been “discontinued”, and her Today.com blog, though Wordpress, is not run by me).

So I’m not a newbie to the WP scene, is what I’m trying to tell you.

And yet, this is the first Wordpress blog that I’ve run for myself - as an author - not just the guy that was called in when a plugin goes awry and bloats the wp_settings table to 73 Meg. So far, I like it. The “patented five-minute install” really is that easy. In fact, it took more like 2-3 minutes, mainly because I was really, really, tired from a week of oncall at work, and could barely keep my eyes open. Of course, that assumes you have a webserver, a database, and php already installed, configured, and working (I did). After the install, everything is as easy as can be. You can install plugins and widgets without ever opening an ftp client. The userbase is enormous, so pretty much every problem you have, somebody else has had already and blogged about the fix. Just tonight I had to figure out how to put the latest post of a specific category in the widgets-based sidebar of a client, and I found three different ways of doing it in 30 minutes. One of those ways (what I ended up doing), was just installing a plugin, that added a widget to do exactly what she wanted. No php coding necessary! Which is good, because I can’t write php.

In summary, I recommend using Wordpress as your blogging software of choice, based on a couple years of maintaining blogs using it, and approximately four days of using it personally. I guess we’ll see how this works out for me…