My blog got me my job. After all, it did make a cameo appearance during my interview, drawing an “Impressive!” from the Editor of the newspaper sitting opposite me. Ever since that episode in early June, I decided that I was justified in spending almost three hours on it each day, checking the stats, making small changes to the design, keeping an eye out for new options and themes, weeding out spam comments, etc.
It is also since then that I have been comfortable spending some money on it. First, I bought a domain, set up some space at Hostgator, and set up WordPress. That didn’t last long because I had a bad time with Hostgator. It could’ve just been that once, but I decided to move. Next in line was Posterous, but once I learnt that it was being bought by Twitter, I decided to move again. I didn’t like the idea of my blog’s host being affiliated with a social networking service, you see.
The third option was Blogger. While its immense flexibility was welcoming, I found it too… unclassy, if I may say so. It didn’t proffer any style of its own, nor did it show any inclination for it. While WordPress.com restricts access to themes’ CSS files, Blogger has almost no restrictions nor offerings. This means that if I wanted a particularly styled theme, I’d have to code it up from scratch, instead of being able to choose from over 200 themes like in WordPress. That much of flexibility isn’t always great, I learnt.
The final stop was Squarespace. At the end of the day, Squarespace doesn’t fall short on many counts (if it falls short at all). For $96 p.a., it offers one free domain, 20 GB of hosting space, a wealth of templates all easily customized, and a minimalist text editor that I think I will miss the most. Where I think it doesn’t match up to WordPress is social networking.
Bloggers on WordPress have the option of following other blogs, liking posts, sharing stuff they like on their own blogs, and generally availing the option to interact more strongly than just by sharing posts on Facebook/Twitter or leaving comments. In fact, I think WordPress also has a lot of “bloggers” who don’t have blogs of their own but are logged in to interact with authors they like.
So, for the fourth time, I returned to WordPress… and here I am. Will I continue to be here? I don’t know. I’m sure something else will come along and I’ll put some of my money in it, perhaps only to find out why WordPress is so awesome for the fifth time.