Well, I give in. I used the blogging software that was the easiest to set up on my site, and low-and-behold, it has been buggy, unreliable, and although free, unsupported by my hosting company (can’t really blame them for that part!). NucleusCMS was great in theory, but the more time I spent on my blog, and on others’ blogs, and in doing more and more research, I decided I needed a stronger platform. So I am switching to WordPress.

I was intimidated by the WordPress installation - because I had to create a database. I may be a bit more technologically savvy than many moms, but I am NOT a coder; nor do I want to be. But in my desperation for a blogging software platform that had plugins that work, and was widely supported in the blogging community, I decided to give the installation a shot. Besides, WordPress is free too, so what did I have to lose? Nada. And you know what? The “Famous 5 Minute Installation” was pretty darn close to that - OK, maybe 30 minutes for me - but fairly harmless all in all.

Customizing the page is always a challenge, because I don’t know PHP or CSS. But I do know a little (and I mean little) html, and I have found that if I look at the code long enough, it starts to make at least a little bit of logical sense and I have had some success in getting the layout the way I want it to be. I think I can hire a freelancer to make some quick changes to appearance and it will cost me very little, so it will be worth it.

And I was even able to get most of my current posts imported into the new blog by saving the blog as an RSS file. I will have to manually add my comments in, but I don’t have a lot to add anyway . And now I am resting easy knowing my trackbacks will work, that I will be able to obtain some REAL analytics for the blog to track where traffic is coming from and track what readers are most interested in so that I can create more of it! If the blog is to succeed, it’s better that I recreate it now with 32 posts rather than a year from now, when the site is much bigger, and I have hundreds of posts and readers to migrate.

So now I am happily and heartily recommending WordPress. Go tell your friends!

Tags: WordPress, NucleusCMS, Blog Setup, Blogs, Blogging Platform

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 3:07 am and is filed under Site Tools + Tips, Newbie Blogging. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.