Blogger continues to have issues as it upgrades the platform to their new interface. At the same time, WordPress offers bloggers a growing number of features to improve both the blogging and reading experience. Is it time to make the move to WordPress?
Yes, I’m a big WordPress fan. I moved to WordPress from TypePad several years ago and find more reasons every day to love this platform. WordPress comes in two forms – the hosted version at WordPress.com and a self-hosted version you install and manage on your own. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but the basic WordPress functionality is the same.
WordPress.com offers a free account with 3GB of space, hundreds of themes, and a comment management system second to none. If you need more space, your own domain name or a custom theme, you can add those features at a very reasonable cost. WordPress.com is owned and operated by the same people who design and maintain the WordPress platform so updates are frequent and painless.
When you choose to host WordPress on your own site, you have more choices for themes and plugins, but you must also maintain the system yourself. WordPress has a one-click update system that is truly amazing, but not all themes and plugins are maintained at the same level of professionalism and can cause issues. When hosting yourself, you’re responsible for both the maintenance and troubleshooting efforts.
Both versions of WordPress offer some impressive options. In addition to blog posts, WordPress has a platform for static pages allowing you to create a complete web site using only the WordPress platform. Look at the top menu bar here at the Gazette and you will see a hierarchical system of pages discussing research resources, my family history and resources related to my book [The Future of Memories - $2.99. Get your copy today!]. Even the blog posts have an organizational system that you can use to give readers easy access to content written months and years ago. I’ve used WordPress categories to organize content by topics. The Inside the Gazette menu in the right sidebar gives readers quick access to the archives associated with each category. At the bottom of each post is a list of tags associated with the post. Click on any tag to find other posts assigned that tag.
The workarea is totally customizeable. You determine which components appear in the space and how they are arranged. If you prefer to have the Tags box above Categories, go into Screen Options and drag it where you want it. In the editor itself, you can quickly go from the visual editor to HTML by clicking the tab at the top of the toolbar.
Both versions have impressive media-handling capabilities, can post content via email and there’s a very nice iPad app for editing and publishing on the go.
So, the big question now is how hard is it to move. WordPress can import content from Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Posterous and several others. My experience moving from TypePad to WordPress was quite painless. The biggest issue is incorporating the new functionality – like categories and tags – with your old content. That will be a manual process, but one that can happen at your own pace. And, your original blog stays functional until your WordPress blog is just the way you want it. For that matter, unless you’re paying for additional space or functionality, there’s no need to shut the old one down at all. Just post a note telling everyone you’ve moved and give them the link to your new blog.
Concerned about learning a new system? Yes, WordPress has a longer learning curve that Blogger, but there’s some impressive help to get you started. Click on the Help button at the top of the editing screen to display context-specific help along with links to other topics. The tutorials in Learn WordPress.com offer a good overview of the entire system and WordPress.tv has a huge library of videos covering everything from basics to advanced topics.
As your family history grows through your blogging efforts, consider the advantages WordPress can offer for organizing and maintaining your posts to give each one the attention it deserves. As you gain experience and confidence in your blogging skills, you may want to move to a platform that gives you more flexibility. Take a look at WordPress. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
One of the biggest challenges in blogging is getting your images web-ready then uploading them to your site. While we’re busy creating archival-quality, high-resolution digital images of our historical photos and documents, the images used on the web are just the opposite – low-resolution and especially small file size. Getting from one state to another can be time-consuming, but Mac users have a delightful tool called 
From iPhoto, find the image you want to include in your post then just drag it down onto the ImageWell icon sitting in your dock. That will open the image in ImageWell. Notice that just below the image is a Send button and next to it a selection button (mine says Moultrie Creek). In preferences, you can set up multiple locations – both local and remote – to send your edited images. I’ve set up FTP locations for my sites, so all I have to do is choose the site then click Send. ImageWell takes care of the rest. In addition to FTP, you can also send to WebDAV locations like MobileMe. 
