This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started five days ago. We’re going to move up from Wordpress.com to the downloadable Wordpress platfrom, and seeing how it fares for writing online.

The downloadable Wordpress platform is the Firefox of bloggers - free, open source, reliable and powerful. The question is this: is it too daunting for the average author to use?

Ease of Use

Wordpress.org is very big on ease of use. Captions like ‘Our famed five minute install’ and its whimsical software upgrade pages poke fun at what they know to be a good user experience.

But while the application insists on its ease-of-use all through downloading, uploading, installing and then customizing, my personal experience two years ago with the platform, as ‘an average user of the internet (who understood basic HTML)’ deviated from the normal ‘5 minute install’, mainly because I used a dicky zip program, didn’t know what FTP was, and uploaded everything into the wrong directory. All in all it took me 2 hours to get everything up and running on my server. Not a good start for such a famed blogging platform, I thought then.

Hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere, don’t we?

But i’m getting slightly ahead of myself in this review. Allow me to explain roughly of what consists of a Wordpress installation.

First off, you download the package from Wordpress.org. It contains a collection of files, mostly PHP, that make up the platform. You open up one file and edit a few lines.

Next, you get your hands on an FTP client (Filezilla is recommended) and then upload the hundred-plus files to a MySQL server. It must be noted that good, free and reliable hosts with PHP are very hard to find (in a year’s worth of searching for a friend the best i could come up with was F2O), but Wordpress.org has a list of good hosts that you have to pay for.

Last of all you go through a breezy setup process that clearly shows why Wordpress is so loved - smooth and easy, tongue in cheek.

Wordpress sounds daunting, but for a platform as powerful as it is the setup and day-to-day running is well designed enough for almost anybody to use. Added features (through plugins) and themes are installed simply by uploading and activating (one click only). It’s top of the line where blogging is concerned, but if you ever intend to edit a theme or write a plugin with no knowledge of PHP, things get tough very fast.

Looks

I’ve already written about how good Wordpress looks in my Wordpress.com review, and everything is equally good, if not better with the downloaded version. Themes are created by a huge community of users, some good, others ugly not to my taste. The great thing about Wordpress is that almost anything is possible in theme designing - Ajax, easy integration with Flickr, Flash, and it’s all done on a platform that’s dedicated to producing standards complaint code. If you don’t understand what that means just buzz it out and understand that it’s good, all good.

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This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started four days ago. After reviewing Blogger I decided to take a look at another good, easy to use and ‘free’ (more on this later) platform available for writing online.

The popular Scobleizer blog (in the Technorati top 100 blogs list) is hosted on the Wordpress.com platform (quite different from Wordpress.org, which you have to download and install yourself). While it looks customized, don’t be fooled - Wordpress.com is not quite the lovely maiden it seems.

Ease of Use

Wordpress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms out there, and it is a daunting task for the average internet user to mod and customize it. The good news is this: Wordpress.com makes it easy enough for anybody to blog using Wordpress, and look good while doing it. The bad news? It rips out a lot of the features that make Wordpress so cool.

But back to its ease of use. Wordpress.com seems polished and beautiful - posting is clean and easy (not to mention Ajaxy) and everything is distilled to checkboxes and menus. Want to add a link? No need to write a whole list of <li> tags - just go to the blogroll section in the interface and fill in the necessary blanks.

The way Wordpress.com goes out of its way to ease things for you almost makes you feel pampered. Big fonts and even bigger buttons are everywhere, wrapped with a beautiful blue colour scheme. Feed subscribers and site visitors are seamlessly integrated with a Flash (or was it Ajax?) display panel. Quite simply, the platform treats you like an idiot. Very nicely, if I may add.

Looks

Wordpress.com looks great. All the themes available are well selected - nice lines and readable fonts. Behind the scenes the platform looks just as good, if not better - the navigation bar at the top uncluttered and clearly defined. Any average Joe can really enjoy himself writing, but there’s a major problem.

You can’t edit or create or upload your own themes.

Wait! Let me elaborate before you start bombing me with comment spam - I’ve been waiting and waiting for them to release that particular feature, but weeks had dragged into months before any change was made. And, Oh! What a change it was! You need to pay to edit yuor themes - and even then only the css style sheets! If you’re sticking to free, Wordpress.com has added features that might attract you - such as the fact that all their themes are widgetised now, and there are a wider selection of quality templates which i’m sure will grow over time.

But, for the rest of the Wordpress.com world (read: the users of the free accounts) is by and large based on the same themes, and no matter how good looking each of them are it’ll be hard top stand out on such a platform.

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This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started two days ago. Here i’ll be reviewing the suitability of the Blogger platform as a medium for blooking, or writing a book on a blog.

The Blogger platform has got it pretty good after being acquired by Google and coming out of a second beta. It’s a simple platform, free, instantly available, and very user friendly. The interface has only 3 tabs - posting, settings and template, keeping options easily accessible and providing a simple flow to any first-time blogger.

Ease of Use

Blooger is amongst the easiest blogging platforms to use. You start off with creating an account, choosing a theme and then you can immediately start posting with a simple interface.

One of its biggest attractions is the fact that Blogger is widely supported. You can post with it through email, phone and services like Flickr and Technorati work with Blogger (almost) seamlessly. Setting are very easily tweaked - a button here, an option there.

Looks

You can’t go wrong with Blogger’s default templates - they’re all clean, and beautifully done - both inside (code) and outside (looks). It turns out that the Blogger team hired Stopdesign to do their themes, and a look under the hood of these templates shows just how good these guys actually are.

The main problem with this, however, is the fact that after awhile it all becomes bland. Here is where the ease of use of the Blogger platform shines through. Templates are created in a one page xHTML document, although clever Blogger users have been known to create Flash and Ajaxified Blogger blogs. It’s flexible to a certain degree - but you can’t deny that your coding options are pretty limited.

On the up side, it’s incredibly easy to edit or create a template - for beginners, load up Minima and start tinkering. Extra templates can be found here and here, but bear in mind the design elements i talked about in my Writing An Addictive Blook series - particularly the point about fonts needing to be big enough for readers to be comfortable with.

Features

Here Blogger scores less marks. A result of all that ease-of-use is that the Blogger platform is static, or severely limited. With the new Blogger (right out of beta) some of the old platform’s issues have been addressed, but unfortunately there’s bound to be a limit, what with it being a free service and all. What am i talking about? Well, let’s take a look at Blogger’s feed options for example.

By default Blogger offers both Atom and RSS, but what are your options for customizing these feeds? Can you exclude certain categories of posts from ending up being published in your feed? Can you edit the way your feed is presented? No, i thought not. And while Blogger has ‘linkback’ it doesn’t have trackback - the standard used by Wordpress and Movable Type blogs.

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