Bill Cammack

OK… so that was a hassle. :D

I just switched this site from Blogger to WordPress. Initially, I wasn’t going to make ReelSolid a web site at all. The original concept was to have it as a holder for my itunes feed. The only reason I made it a blog at all was so I could use feedburner.

I ran into an issue a while back, regarding categories. The only way to do them in Blogger is to make several blogs and link them. That’s all well and good until you have to make several changes, and then you have to go all over creation checking that you re-created everything the way you originally planned it. My boy CoolP over @ haitixchange.com had been telling me about using databases for the longest, but I didn’t have that much information at the time, so I didn’t mind changing everything every time someone suggested a new idea to me like using Flash (or at this point, Ogg Vorbis).

Finally, I decided to check out WordPress, and it’s really impressive, compared to Blogger. I went with Blogger since it’s easy to get started with, and I wasn’t concerned with any other functionality. The problem with ‘simple’ is that the more different forms of information you become involved with, the more containers you need… UNLESS you can put them all in one place and define them by manipulating their database entries. You don’t have to move the data, but you can distribute it however you want to. I can make as many categories and sub-categories as I like. I can point the car-people to the car-stuff and the bike-people to the bike-stuff.

One of the things that snagged me was that I didn’t realize WordPress was dynamically creating “pages” for archives and categories. When I switched from Blogger, I left my archive folders intact, so WP couldn’t create the new archives on the fly. I tried emptying one of the folders, and even that didn’t work until I deleted that folder, then WP did its thing. I lost a few permalinks, but I’m not concerned about that, because I didn’t have people linking to my pages anyway. They can just re-find the pages they’re interested in in their new locations. :D

Updating is MUCH faster with WP. None of that waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, WAAAAITNG!!! to see if Blogger decides to go all the way to 100 to post your entire blog, or whether you have to start all over or wait until it’s not the middle of the day :/ I haven’t gotten anywhere near plugins and backgrounds and trackbacks, blah blah blah, but there’s definitely more ‘room to breathe’ with WordPress, and my time was well spent making the changeover.