Remember when Steve Jobs announced the transition to Intel Chip he mentioned how they have a team secretly running OSX on Intel chip for 5 years while they were using PowerPC chip on all their Macs? Well, I am doing the same to my blog! I am running two secret labs experimenting with other blogging platforms. As I mentioned in a previous post that I was frustrated with Blogger, so I have been secretly running an identical private blog using wordpress.com, another blog-hosting service that is similar to Blogger that they hosted your blog and provided everything for you.

WordPress.com has many aspects that are better than Blogger. It definitely have simple features that should have been on Blogger long time ago but still lacks – archive calendar comes to mind. However, in terms of flexibility, it’s not as good as Blogger. You can’t edit the html code at all, and even editing CSS is only allowed if you pay for it. There are also more and nicer default themes and widgets to choose from. But still, I wasn’t satisfied. I set up yet another secret operation.

This time I am using the WordPress software but self-hosting the blog on my computer instead. With a Mac and the simple app MAMP, I was able to host a blog on my own machine. (Of course if I ever decided this is the way to go, I would get a hosting service, but for now, it’s an experiment so my own computer is sufficient enough.) With MySQL and PHP involved, it was complicated but because of MAMP, it was relatively easy to set a blog up and running. The best thing about this method is the freedom and the ease of use once your blog is set up. The plugin and theme architecture give you freedom without being difficult. I still need more time to get use to the code of php to customize a theme to my own liking, but using the plugin architecture is a lot easier than to hack the html code in Blogger to achieve what I want in my blog.

There are still some difficulties but the experiment so far has been running more smoothly than I had hope for. I still haven’t made a decision on rather if I want to switch away from Blogger yet, but if I do-Steve gave a year’s time for the transition from PowerPC to Intel-for my blogging platform transition, it could be less~

Related posts:

1. Is it time to update the look of the blog?
2. My thoughts on Blogger beta
3. Where’s my stats?
4. Tag Cloud
5. Complaining about Blogger

Tagged: Blogger · Blogging · Site News · Wordpress