Subject to Change

It’s been less than a week since my WordPress conversion and I’ve already decided that I don’t like this platform.

The only advantage, I feel, that I’ve scored over Blogger is that my blog and publishing utilities SHOULD always be available. I’m now in charge of my own blogging destiny, so to speak, because I have access to everything as long as my URL is alive. It’s a huge relief, considering Blogger’s amazing ability to crash at inconvenient times. Sadly, I’ve managed to break the new blog three times already by trying to install plug-ins. I even had a near-miss that prevented me from even logging in to WordPress.

The drawbacks of WordPress, however, have got me thinking that I’ve only made one small step for a man, rather than one giant leap for mankind. This engine is very plug-in oriented, which sounds cool at first. The problem is that all of the plug-ins are third party. Worse yet, I can’t find very many that are written for version 2.0 of WordPress. Can you beleive (note spelling) they built a blogging software without a spell checker? Don’t bother searching for a plug-in. They’re on foreign language web sites and most of them don’t work in version 2.0.

There’s still some hope for the software. In software years, it’s young. The core has been updated a few times in the past year. One of the typical pitfalls of open source projects is that they tend to stagnate. Hundreds or thousands of developers, each with their own opinions and no incentive to produce, tends to be a recipe for code bloat and feature creep.

A Proposal

I have an idea for a Cheddarsphere project. I emailed Jay Bullock to look into the feasability of using Cheddarsphere.com as a hosting site for training/test blogs. The ultimate goal: to have a site where you can try the software and read instructions or tips (written by us bloggers) on how to easily move from one platform to another.

I think it’s a worthwhile project and I may decide to take charge of it on my own if Cheddarsphere.com isn’t interested. I think that I can use sub2change.com for the same purpose now. I’ll just need help from interested bloggers to maintain the site and to write the how-to manuals.