Today after some consideration over the weekend I rebuilt my personal website with Word Press blog software. Up until today I was using Joomla, a CMS (Content Management System). Why the switch?
The simple reason was for simplicity.
I spent several months working with Joomla in order to learn more about CMS. It is a great way to manage a site with lots of content and different users. While I hope to have lots of content on my site, I won't be having a lot of users providing content. I also was working with Joomla for work.
I work at a church that has a static website design. We manually create and update each page with content. There is a very limited number of people able to update the content. In fact, up until a few months ago I never knew how to update anything myself. I felt very handicapped.
In addition, I've been dreaming about moving the church to a CMS type of site. In order to maintain a dynamic site we really need to enable the end users to submit and maintain content along with editorial controls. These kinds of systems can become pretty complex to set-up; however, they are realitively easy to maintain. This weekend I felt my time learning Joomla had reached an end.
Before moving things to Word Press I did look briefly into drupal, another CMS. I didn't even try to load it on my current webhost. Unlike Joomla, drupal didn't have anyone making tutorials showing me how to install drupal on my webhost's server. I probably could have figured out how to install it, but I also ran across some comments that indicated I would probably run into problems down the road with my account. So, I moved on.
My webhost (ipowerweb.com) has an automatic script that installed Word Press automatically for me on my site. It didn't take long at all. In fact, it was so fast you almost wonder if it is too good to be true.
In addition to moving from Joomla to WordPress I gathered all my blog posts from other sites and put them here. As I write I realized I have a few more blog entries to gather from a few other sites. I know quite a few people in high school and college who do a lot with social networking sites. I set myself up on several different sites to see what they were like and to see how many people I know might be using them. After several weeks learning about those different sites, I learned some interesting things.
No social networking site has a corner on the market. Some may be big; however, it doesn't matter if most of your friends who you really want to keep connected with don't use the site.
Most social networks don't allow you to easily exchange blog postings from each other. Wouldn't it just be great if you could blog one entry and post on several different sites? Well, there definitely would be some issues with centralizing all the comments people might make, but all your friends could be kept in the loop better.
For the next few weeks I'm going to run my own blog for a while. I'm going to use it to centralize all the blog entries I write along with links to all the other people I occassionally like to keep tabs on. If others want to post entries on my blog that will be just fine; however, I'm primarily doing it for my own edification. Like I've seen written before... once you try all the blog services available on the internet you eventually will want a blog you can fully control. It will be a little more work to maintain; however, having a central point from which to manage my connections to the rest of the world will be very handy.
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