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Wordpress blog
Apr. 22nd, 2012 04:40 pmThe minor news of the weekend is: I have set up a basic Wordpress blog here. Eveeeentually my old, abandoned website address should be pointing to it, and I'll slowly be adding bits and pieces of free poetry and fiction to it as well.
What does this mean for those of you following me on Dreamwidth and Livejournal? Absolutely nothing - I'll still be doing my main blogging here. The Wordpress site will be mainly used for professional announcements and that sort of thing, with occasional crossposts of things like con reports and so on.
In the offchance anyone from Livejournal's owners is reading this, however, the main reasons I set up a Wordpress account are:
1. Ease of use -- this was much easier than setting up and coding a website. Should I ever get to the coding of the website bit, I can always download the Wordpress software, integrate it into the website, and go on from there.
2. A more professional, clean look. When I initially started my Livejournal, nearly ten years ago now, this was not a huge concern, but it is now. Livejournal has admittedly been offering more themes and so on, but customization is still limited, and many of those themes are a bit too cutesy for what I want to do -- or difficult to read.
3. The ability to add multiple pages, and to be able to customize the "about me" page and separate it into several pages. (This was the biggie; my list of publications has become rather unwieldy to be put on just one page, and the poetry and non-fiction in particular gets lost.)
4. Easy tweaking of the blog and setup. (Not that I've actually taken advantage of this, mind you.)
Please note, Livejournal, that none of the things I was looking for included games, the ability to send electronic gifts to anyone, the ability to find Livejournal and like it on Facebook, your site logging me out on a regular basis and, when doing so, sending me to the login page with a convenient ad instead of directly to the page I was heading to, and then failing to remember what page I was heading to, which is not always my own blog page, LJ, a cute little "scissor" image on LJ-cuts, putting ads on my blog/user info page when I have specifically paid to keep my blog ad-free, and so on.
You've pretty much already lost the game/silly quiz/one sentence updates to Facebook (and to a considerably lesser extent Twitter.) What you have left are people who really want to blog, to record their thoughts in a journal, to interact at some length with friends and readers from around the world. Play to that strength.
What does this mean for those of you following me on Dreamwidth and Livejournal? Absolutely nothing - I'll still be doing my main blogging here. The Wordpress site will be mainly used for professional announcements and that sort of thing, with occasional crossposts of things like con reports and so on.
In the offchance anyone from Livejournal's owners is reading this, however, the main reasons I set up a Wordpress account are:
1. Ease of use -- this was much easier than setting up and coding a website. Should I ever get to the coding of the website bit, I can always download the Wordpress software, integrate it into the website, and go on from there.
2. A more professional, clean look. When I initially started my Livejournal, nearly ten years ago now, this was not a huge concern, but it is now. Livejournal has admittedly been offering more themes and so on, but customization is still limited, and many of those themes are a bit too cutesy for what I want to do -- or difficult to read.
3. The ability to add multiple pages, and to be able to customize the "about me" page and separate it into several pages. (This was the biggie; my list of publications has become rather unwieldy to be put on just one page, and the poetry and non-fiction in particular gets lost.)
4. Easy tweaking of the blog and setup. (Not that I've actually taken advantage of this, mind you.)
Please note, Livejournal, that none of the things I was looking for included games, the ability to send electronic gifts to anyone, the ability to find Livejournal and like it on Facebook, your site logging me out on a regular basis and, when doing so, sending me to the login page with a convenient ad instead of directly to the page I was heading to, and then failing to remember what page I was heading to, which is not always my own blog page, LJ, a cute little "scissor" image on LJ-cuts, putting ads on my blog/user info page when I have specifically paid to keep my blog ad-free, and so on.
You've pretty much already lost the game/silly quiz/one sentence updates to Facebook (and to a considerably lesser extent Twitter.) What you have left are people who really want to blog, to record their thoughts in a journal, to interact at some length with friends and readers from around the world. Play to that strength.