To Wordpress of not to Wordpress

I'm seriously thinking about moving away from blogger... The other day Matt jumped ship and switched to Wordpress. Following his suggestion I created a free account: terminally.wordpress.com.

As you can see, it seamlessly imported my whole blog which is great. The layout is clean and neat. But the best part of wordpress, is probably the Ajaxified user interface. They take the full advantage of the ajax goodies providing all kinds of bells and whistles like drag-and-drop interfaces for arranging your sidebar and etc...

But, it is done at the cost of customizability. Ever wondered why every wordpress blog looks the same? Because they don't let you to tweak the templates! This really sucks! I would jump ship in a heartbeat if I was allowed the same level of customizability as here on blogger. If I switched today I would have to abandon the following things:

• Nicetitles: the nifty javascript that draws those nice squares when you hover over links


• Floating captions under images - they are done with css. I really like doing the captions...


• Custom handling of the <code> tags - I make sure that white space is preserved when I post code snippets using css. This is not the default handling.


• Automatic XFN icons - I use a css hack that puts appropriate icon image on links with the rel attribute


• Collapsible Posts - I use a small javascript that lets me collapse and expand parts of really long posts. I don't use it often, but it is a nice trick to have!


• Using obscure HTML tags - I like to use these "weird" tags that no one ever knows about like <acronym>, <dfn> or <address>. They are in the W3C spec, but to make sure they are handled properly I define css for them

These are all the little tweaks that I have adopted over the last year or so, and I don't feel like giving them up...

My other beef with wordpress is that the default post editor is WYSYWIG. I hate that. I always type my posts in plain HTML mode. This gives me more control over my post and let's me use all the obscure HTML tags that I want. Wordpress does give you an option to edit HTML but it is not very convenient. It seems to be designed only for quick and minor tweaks - not actual day to day use. Ugh...

So for now, I think I'll stay with good old blogger. At least here I can tear down the template and adapt it to whatever theme or layout I need.

But sometime down the road, I might get my own hosting... And then wordpress would be a viable solution. Because if I have the code, I can tweak the templates and the layouts till I'm happy with them :)

Tags: blog, blogging, blogging services, wordpress, swiching services, blogger, customization, css