[WEB4LIB] Re: Blog: Open source vs. commercial

[D.H. Mattison]

May 2, 2005

I've been using WordPress since June 2003. I like it a lot. There are some
problems with it, but overall it's extremely robust, though I've never
actually had it crash, thank goodness. Most of the external blogging clients
I've tried such as w.Bloggar, NewzCrawler and Sauce Reader, don't fully work
with it due to the WordPress multiple categories architecture. My main peeve
with WordPress is that the system architecture keeps changing, but I guess
that's to be expected and happens even with commercial applications. But
every time there's a new release it means fiddling with the templates that
render the site. Since I'm not a programmer it can be quite a challenge to
fix something as happened recently when I discovered comments were broken.
Comment spam in WordPress seems to be a thing of the past now, because
WordPress 1.5 has integrated comment spam protection. You can, however, also
install plugins if you want to be extra secure.

One of the great things about WordPress is the developer community that's
grown up around it, especially since WordPress produced a plugin
architecture along the lines of Movable Type. Wanting to give tags
(folksonomy) a try, I found a beauty of a plugin by a Canadian developer
called Jerome's Keywords Plugin for WordPress 1.5. With his help I was able
to get it up and running within a couple of days. You can see my "Tags and
Topics Cosmos" at http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/?page_id=1147 or
looking at recent blog posts to see how I've used tags and my categories.

I learned today that Opera 8's support of Atom also draws upon Jerome's
plugin so that anyone subscribing to my Atom feed and reading it in Opera
8's e-mail client will see the tags and categories I've assigned. Clicking
them will take you to the Technorati Tags page for that keyword or category.
I currently also have links to the Technorati Tags page for each keyword
I've assigned as part of the visible metadata for each blog post.

In answer to Karen Schneider's question about the RSS feed for comments,
perhaps if you post it as a suggestion on the WordPress site someone will
tackle it.

I was a beta tester for TypePad and decided I'd rather spend the money on
hosting my own site rather than paying a near-equivalent amount for *just* a
blog.

David Mattison
Victoria, BC, Canada
dmattison at shaw.ca
Tiki Wiki Hut: http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki
Ten Thousand Year Blog: http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress