Re: My Blog!

[wolfshades]

Hey everyone! Just thought I’d share something with you about blogs. I’ve been blogging for a number of years now, having started out on MySpace. (I’ll resist the urge to rant about MySpace at this point. Anyway, it’s no place for bloggers now)

I put up blogs on various blog sites, just to test and see which ones served me (and hopefully, my readers) the best. Frankly, none of them serve to bring in readers the way MySpace did. I suppose there’s a need out there that some enterprising person can bring: a social network that serves up blogs as an outlet, and means of creating conversation.

Anyway, I’ve tried blogger, blogspot, livejournal, and a few others. So far, the best one that I’ve found (and landed on, at my site, which is http://wolfshades.com ) is WordPress.

WordPress, unlike some of the others, is entirely devoted to the blogger’s need to gather readers. I noticed that one or two are all about censoring – which can be a major turnoff, frankly. Some will only allow subscriptions from folk who use google friend connect, or one or two other venues.

WordPress tries its hardest to be accessible to everyone and as many sites as possible. You can subscribe to a blog via email, if you want, and get the blog emailed to you when a new one comes out. WordPress also has tools to help you advertise your blogs – you can even send links to Twitter and Facebook (or not) if you want. The main thing for the one writing the blog is that there are tools out there to help you compose offline if you want, and tweak it to your heart’s content before uploading. Honestly, WordPress impresses the heck out of me. Oh (and this is a big one!) – WordPress commenting is just like MySpace, where readers who comment, can reply to a previous comment, and it shows up as an indented response. Very cool. And you can set security up any way you like – you can set it up so that every comment must be approved, if that’s important to you. (For me, it’s not – I’d prefer that readers have instant gratification, with their comments showing up immediately. I can always delete unwanted comments if I want anyway.) Finally – WordPress has an auto-spam feature that detects when spammers try to leave comments that are thinly disguised attempts to pull readers to their sites. Put simply, those posts don’t actually show up in the page – they instead show up in a separate area where you can review and delete them if you want. Rarely has an authentic post got caught in the anti-spam device, but when it does, you can immediately click “approve” and it’ll get posted.

I love love love WordPress. (And no I don’t work for them or receive any renumeration – it’s just that I’m an aspiring novelist who blogs, and this is the best tool out there that I’ve found)

P.S. Just for the record, I subscribe to non-WordPress blogs too, and too often find that when I want to post a comment, I have to enter in all kinds of information every time, and then do a CAPTCHA, and more often than not, my comment won’t post, and I have to re-post about two or three times before it finally says “your comment is awaiting approval”.

REPORT ABUSE