I’ve finally decided to get off of Typepad and move to WordPress.
I start with typepad in 2004 when I first started videoblogging.
Since there were no free video hosts (youtube wasnt even a dream), Typepad was great because I could upload a video directly to my blog on their servers. Perfect for me. But three years later, I am only frustrated with the lack of customization with Typepad. It’s crazy how little Typepad has embraced video.
For the techies, here’s a list of reasons and challenges:
- WordPress allows me to customize my blog much more in look and format
- WordPress will let me upload everything to my own server
- Archiving all my data is much easier
- WordPress has a good, strong community that’s always improving the platform.
All this is important since I want to keep building my blog during my life.
I need to have control of my own data.
Coolness. Potential moving data headaches aside, I think that you’ll like WordPress!
We started with homebrew software for our blogs and then moved to WordPress. I am continually surprised at the things I take for granted that aren’t available on other blog packages. When I started adding video to my blogs, I didn’t have to fight with anything. Enric’s cool VPIP and I was ready to go.
You gonna luv WordPress! I betcha!
I don’t even know how long I’ve been on WordPress, but it’s been quite a while, and you will love it. I switched from Movable Type (which cost me beaucoup bucks because they charge by the number of authors, not the number of blogs) to WP because it had great capabilities and the (free) price was perfect. I’m plenty literate in programming and frequently hack the PHP and I always use the tremendous flexibility of WP “Themes.” So I could afford right from the start to dive in and fix anything that malfunctioned. But that’s been extremely rare! Probably twice in a couple of years.
I now run 15+ blogs on WordPress including two of my own [the main one being http://blog.dlfound.org/sky ] – on my own servers. Then there’s also the multi-user (really multi-blog) version WP-MU [ http://mu.wordpress.org/ ] that I’m looking into because upgrading 15+ blogs takes me about 3 hours every time it happens, and believe me it is frequent. So upgrading WP-MU once and having them all come up to speed would be really nice. (Alternative is Lyceum, [ http://lyceum.ibiblio.org/ ] with the same goal, but they’re not up to version 2.2 yet.)
As long as you have a backup it is *so good* to know that everything’s sitting on a server that you really control. This also lets you add gizmos that otherwise wouldn’t be possible on the free hosting services – for instance, I aggregate a bunch of RSS feeds using Carp and Grouper and then just write some PHP to drop them into my blogs. (This is easier now with Yahoo Pipes, but I still use Carp/Grouper for some tasks).
Go to it boy! [And thanks for all the help you've given our projects.]
[Sky]
I just moved to wordpress from Movable Type mostly for the same reasons. Have no regret. I thought of MU too, but it didn’t support widgets (and there were some server issues I couldn’t solve). Maybe now it does.
The installation and transition of the posts was easy and done within 30 min or less, deciding on how it should look like, get to know there lingo, and have all post fit the new presentation took me ages. But it’s worth it. Good luck!
I’s moving to WP, too! And man does it ever make me nervous!
See you on the other side!