New Blog at WordPress

I am considering changing Blog hosts, from Blogger to WordPress. While I've enjoyed the Blogger platform a lot, and found it VERY easy to use in many ways, there have been some limitations that I've been using other tools to work around. One of the key tools that bloggers have are Technorati tags, or catagories, which associate your blog post with various searchable tags. For example, my default tags are "steeletech" and "View From the Edge" and when i posted my recent post on Jesus and da Vinci, I used the tags "jesus" "relgion" "philosophy" and a few others as well. What that means is that anyone wanting to search for blogs on Jesus would get a hit from my post on da Vinci code and the historical context of Jesus.

Blogger let me so that, in a round about way, and I've been adding technorati tags for a lot of my posts, but its not an easy or seamless process with Blogger, whereas with WordPress, it seems to be part of the default posting. That should increase my traffic, as people searching on Technorati (or many other tagged services) who may never have any other reason to hear of me will get hits to my posts.

I'm still learning WordPress. There are places where its not quite as functional as Blogger as well. In templates, for example, Blogger has an excellent facility that lets a user use pre-defined templates for a basic look and feel, but they also allow webmonkeys to get under the hood and tweak the HTML and javascript themselves, if they want. WordPress is more restrictive that way … so far it seems like I can't actually edit the underlying code for my sight. That has made adding my metrics code from Performancing.com a bit challenging … haven't managed to get it added yet, but WordPress has some built in metrics that may do what I want anyway.

In the end, I'm not sure which platform I will stay with … for the time being, I think I will update both. There are some logistical issues … The Hour, on the CBC website, has linked to my old address, and while I can send them an email to update, its a bit of a hassle for them. For that reason at least, I want to always leave my Blogger sight up to receive hits from The Hour, though I plan to add links to this page over there as well.

I think the two platforms are essentially transparent from the reader's perspective. I would be interested on reader comment though … if there is something about one platform or the other that readers like, I want to know that, but if theres anyone else out there with experience with these issues and these platforms, I'd love to hear your thoughts.