It’s 10am on Sunday morning, and it feels like I’ve been up for hours already (in reality, I HAVE been up for hours). I have weighty contemplations on my mind - ones concerning blogging platforms.
For the past 5 years or so, I have been using WordPress as a platform for my personal contribution to the world wide web. My writing has been both self hosted, and hosted by wordpress more than once during that time, as I have flip-flopped between looking after my own content, and trusting WordPress to do the same.
As much as I like WordPress, their continual fiddling with the platform is starting to perplex me. They keep adding doodads onto it with little or no thought for design, or useability. They recently rolled out social sharing buttons, to go alongside comments and their own “Like” system - the end result is posts that look like link farms. Madness.
While I realise I could turn all of it off, that brings with it all manner of repercussions in terms of the hosts not publicising your content - you have to play nicely I don’t like that.
So - this Sunday morning finds me taking YET ANOTHER look around the blog hosts, and I’m having trouble finding anything that doesn’t have a glaring problem
Tumblr is great, but suffers the walled-garden syndrome through it’s lack of comments, and “like” functionality.
WordPress is great if self hosted, but I don’t want to do that.
Blogspot is great, but migrating old content across would take months (you can only transfer 50 posts per day)
Posterous is just too damn slow - and monkeys with the styling of the text in a way I don’t like.
Squarespace is unquestionably brilliant - but at a hell of a price.
What do to what to do?