Anne Truitt Zelenka

Since Blogger ate half my custom-built blog template yesterday and I hadn’t saved an updated copy, I decided I might as well look at other options since I’m in for a lot of work anyway.I would feel depressed about the work I lost except that my intention with regard to blogging, at least on this blog, is to treat it primarily as a learning experience. I imagine that reasons for blogging are as varied as the people that do it. While I enjoy the social connection and the eventual professional launch I hope this will help me make, right now it’s mostly about learning. The loss of my template is just another opportunity to learn and a good opportunity to add some new capabilities to my site.

I’ve been curious about WordPress, that open-source darling of the technigentsia. To get some sense of what it was about, I signed up for a free blog hosted by WordPress.com, which has only recently been opened for signup without invites. WordPress.com provides a limited subset of the WordPress content management system features. It doesn’t currently support domain mapping in which you use your own domain name with their hosting, but may offer it in the future for a fee. So WordPress.com is not a real solution for me right now, as I want to keep using my own domain. But I thought it might show me what it would be like to work with WordPress on my own host.

As a veteran of Blogger and TypePad, I’m used to having a lot (Blogger) or at least a little (TypePad) control over my page layout. I have only the medium level of service on TypePad, so I don’t have full control over the template, but it’s been barely satisfactory. WordPress.com, though, only provides a basic set of templates with limited customization. I can’t even access what little customization there is—I get the message “Cannot load functions.php” when I choose “Current Theme Options.” So this doesn’t really show me what using WordPress on my own host would be like, since WordPress is known for its extensive customizability using web standards like XHTML and CSS.

However, I do like the Toni 1.0 template I’m using right now on my test blog. The monochromatic scheme is soothing and I’ve come around to appreciating fixed-width, left-aligned layouts for their simplicity. I am thinking whether I use Blogger or some other approach I will use some modification of this for my design. Perhaps I’ll change the color scheme to orange, to give it more energy. I also like some things about the Jellfish Blogger template I’m currently using for this blog. The header fonts are way too big but they’re kind of charming in a clumsy way.

I’ve evolved to the point in my blogging that I really do need to run my own content management system, either WordPress or Movable Type. I can’t imagine not going with WordPress since it uses PHP and MySQL, two tools I’d really like to learn to use. It has the aura of tech hipness too. It means switching my GoDaddy web hosting account from Windows to Linux. Although WordPress will work on some GoDaddy windows hosting accounts, it sounds like it’s much easier to work with on a Linux platform. When I established it, I was thinking I’d learn ASP.NET. Now I can’t resist the pull of open source.