Comments on: WordPress = Bliss: The Joy of Customization

By: jide.fr » Template freshy (Wordpress)

jide.fr » Template freshy (Wordpress) — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:55:30 +0000

[...] I’d Rather Be Writing » WordPress = Bliss; Also, Tips for Troubleshooting : […] 2. If you’re having trouble with a theme, go to the Author’s home page. The author is the expert, and they often have a forum of questions. For example, I was having trouble modifying the pages that appeared in the navigation of the Freshy theme, so I went to the author’s home page and found the answer in the first few questions posed on his site. […] [...]

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:00:57 +0000

I was most frustrated by Blogger’s lack of categories, though some other foibles left a bad taste in my mouth. One of Blogger’s worst features is its WYSIWYG HTML editor. Check out one of my posts imminently before switching to see some a highlight of some awful HTML code:

http://blog.demodulated.com/2006/11/29/demodulated-routed/

Things went smoothly with Blogger for about a year, but I made the mistake of trusting Google’s concept of “beta” by opting in to the one-way transition to the unfinished rendition of Blogger. It was exceptionally sloppily patched-together and I ran into all kinds of error codes.

In the end, what annoyed me most of all was the fact that Blogger has such a huge installed-base and it’s operated by one of the richest companies in the world, yet Google was inexplicably slow at fixing bugs and implementing widely-requested features that came standard with other platforms.

Blogger served me well but I’ve graduted. I love blogging enough to foot the bill for web space, even if no one is reading. WordPress is far more professional and delightfully extensible!

I’m curious, how did you display the number of posts beside each category? That’s brilliant!

Boy, do I wish I could attend your DocTrain talk! Blogging is a great topic!

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:00:53 +0000

Thanks for correcting me about Blogger. I checked out the new version of Blogger — you’re right, you can modify it and get into the code. I wasn’t aware that they had made it so open and customizable. They really have improved it tremendously. I revised my blog post to be more accurate.

Can you tell me why you switched to WordPress, even though you were able to customize your Blogger theme? What was it about WordPress that converted you to it?

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:15:58 +0000

I used Blogger for over a year and customized a few themes quite significantly. I’ve since switched to WordPress which certainly makes it easier to delve into a certain aspect of the source code (e.g., header, body, sidebar) than Blogger but the two platforms are about equally robust.

For example, here’s a link to my old blog:
http://demodulated.blogspot.com/

The customizations are obvious when viewed alongside another blog with an unmodified copy of the same template:
http://adhd-mama.blogspot.com/

Blogger has a LOT of shortcomings but customizing the template was never one of them. It’s quite easy to download third-party templates and tweak them.