I am feeling really frustrated right now – like I’m stuck in limbo with a conundrum on my hands. Why? Because I’ve grown to love WordPress so much so that I really prefer it over TypePad, for an increasing number of reasons. (Please note that in this review, when I refer to WordPress, I’m talking about the full version of it – the one that must be installed on your own web server. In the few instances where I refer to wordpress.com, the hosted and dumbed-down version of WP, I specify it’s wordpress.com I’m talking about.)

The main issue is how spam is handled. On TypePad, spam is a nightmare to deal with, whereas on WordPress spam is almost a non-issue (provided you are using the proper plug-ins like Spam Karma 2 for those running v1.5.x – or for those on WP 2.0, the included and revolutionary Akismet).

Then there are all the other easily customizable things. Like the look and feel of your site. Ok, so TypePad’s is easier to control without having to know any code — but really limited in comparison to WP. As my comprehensive wordpress theme list shows, there are now 615 free wordpress themes out there, and growing! OVER SIX HUNDRED. That’s a staggering amount of templates to choose from to give your blog it’s own unique flair. And they are all customizable as well (if you know some css) – and with WordPress 2.0, themes can be made customizable within the admin area by their authors such that bloggers can customize areas of the theme at will without ever touching any code!

Then there’s the issue of pagination. It’s quite simple – WordPress has it and TypePad doesn’t. By pagination, I mean those little links folks have grown accustomed to seeing on blogs that say “Next Page” and “Previous Page”. Don’t see them on this blog? That’s b/c TypePad doesn’t have that feature. TypePad bloggers get to choose the number of posts that will appear on their homepage, and after that – well, good luck navigating the blog b/c the only options are to do so through clicking on the categories or the monthly archives. TypePad doesn’t even have built-in search. And of course, WordPress does. (TypePad users should check out my article on how to make your typepad blog searchable).

And then there are the plugins. No small matter. WordPress has plugins that enhance it’s functionality for almost any thing you could want to do with it:

• Tagging plugins (such as Jerome’s Keywords or the Ultimate Tag Warrior) that provide an easy way to automatically tag posts with keywords for social bookmarking systems such as Technorati, del.icio.us, and Flickr. This means more traffic for your blog. Tags also provide a whole new way for readers to interact with a blog. For example, Jerome’s Keywords makes it so “readers can click on a post’s keyword/tag link to see other posts with the same tag. It’s a simple but effective way of letting users find content that interests them.”. You can even create a local tag cosmos.
• Post related plugins, such as the ability to display the top 10 most popular posts in your sidebar, or the ability to show a list of related posts when viewing an individual post
• Comment related plugins, such as giving users the ability to display gravatars in their comments and allowing blog readers to subscribe to a particular post’s comments
• There are just WAY too many ways in which plugins expand the functionality of WordPress way beyond the capabilities of TypePad to even discuss here. And from what I’ve been hearing about WP 2.0, which provides added hooks making it even easier for programmers to create even more fantastic plugins in the future, the possibilities seem limitless.

Customization of where you ping to notify the world that you’ve updated your blog — WordPress has it, and (you guessed it) TypePad doesn’t. The workaround with TypePad if you want to use a service like pingoat, is to paste the URL for pingoat’s RPC server into the Trackback area for each and every post, each and every time you update it.

And while this isn’t an issue for me in choosing a blogging platform, the issue of cost still needs to be brought up in any review. Again, it’s simple – WordPress is free, and TypePad isn’t. Of course, the full version of WP with all of it’s glory and customizable options (including access to all free themes and plugins) requires you to have a web hosting server with mysql support (which most do). Which means it really isn’t entirely free b/c now you’re paying for web-hosting. But if you do want entirely free, Wordpress.com offers that — and while it’s a really dumbed down version of WP, it still offers some things that TypePad doesn’t, like sub-categories (however, it doesn’t allow you to run adsense ads on your site – you get what you pay for with wordpress.com).

Then there’s ease of use when posting. When it comes to blogging editors, WordPress 2.0 finally has a built in WYSIWYG editor (something TypePad has had all along, and which I think every blogging tool should offer). The only problem is that WordPress’s wysiwyg editor is kinda buggy. See this problem that I encountered on my WordPress 2.0 test blog. However, I generally use an external windows client (BlogJet) to post to my blogs, which has it’s own WYSIWYG editor that’s better than both of them. But you also need to take speed into account when you talk about ease of posting. WordPress is very speedy when creating or updating posts. TypePad is very sluggish, especially if you are sending trackbacks to a large number of sites.

Want stats for your blog? Well TypePad only shows you referrers from the past 24 hours. That’s it. And not only that, but it is slow as molasses

Now there are a few areas in which TypePad sort of shines in comparison to WordPress, with the main one being maintenance and upgrading. I say sort-of, because sometimes TypePad has outages and when that happens there ain’t a thing you can do about it. On the other hand, every time WordPress comes out with an upgrade, it can sometimes be a major pain in the rear to install it, wreaking all sorts of havoc over your blog (although sometimes the upgrade process is totally smooth). All of that customizability that WP offers through themes, plugins, etc, makes for more things that can get broken every time there’s an upgrade. And sometimes it seems like those upgrades come every few days (like after the release of WordPress 1.5 when there were numerous minor point releases that were required updates because they pertained to security flaws which seemed to come out every few days!) And when there’s an upgrade, you’re the one that has to install it (unless you’re using a free wordpress host like blogsome, but then you’re at the mercy of them deciding which themes and plugins are available to you, and when and if they’re going to do an upgrade – right now they’re still using WP 1.5). When TypePad does an upgrade, it’s behind the scenes and you find out about it in the TypePad news (unless the upgrade wreaks havoc on their servers, in which case you get the joy of TypePad outages, the inability to post to your blog for sometimes days on end, etc – but ultimately they fix it, and it’s up to them, not you, to fix it).

All of this makes me want to move this blog and all of it’s posts (and future posts to come) over to wordpress on my own server at emilyrobbins.com. Which brings me to my conundrum (and the possible state of limbo). Is it worth moving an existing site that gets over 1000 visitors a day and is ranked well in the search engines over to another server, URL, and blogging system entirely, possibly losing all of my backlinks and high pagerank that I spent so much time in generating? And if so, should I wait until WordPress 2.0 has ironed out some more of the kinks (there are currently problems with trackbacks, which I think is a rather major issue, among other things) before proceeding?

WordPress 1.5.2 works great and is a very stable release. But I know I’ll eventually want to move to Wordpress 2.0.x — it’s new features are just too enticing. And I also know that I do not want to have to deal with doing the kind of major upgrade that going from 1.5 to 2.0 entails on a website that is this important to me (I just don’t have the time deal with it in case something goes wrong with the upgrade, and there have been far too many reports of people having trouble with the upgrade for me to risk it). But I’m getting so damn sick of TypePad’s limitations, and even more so of managing all the spam (I have to have all of my trackbacks and comments moderated because of the vulgar spam that people try to put through a zillion times a day – an issue that I wouldn’t have to deal with if I were using WordPress instead).

So what should I do? Should I hold off on doing any more posting until WordPress 2.0 comes out with a more stable version and then move the whole site over to WP 2? Should I just take the plunge now, and hope that the trackback issues don’t affect me too much until they are resolved? But what if I lose all of my traffic as a result?Should I just leave things as they are right now and stick with TypePad for ‘How to Blog’??

What to do? What to do??????

Update: I’ve taken the plunge now that WordPress 2.0.1 has come out and moved How to Blog over to http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/ so please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds!

Being new to blogging, my first decision is going to have to be which blogging software to use????

I’m starting off with TypePad because it appears to be the quickest way to get going (I am now on the trial version). I was considering using Blogger, as it looks easy to customize and hey, it’s FREE, but was disappointed when I found out that they don’t have categories (a MUST for me) AND they don’t support TrackBack (Update - I just published a new article just comparing TypePad to Blogger dated 2/26/05 - check it out)

Originally, I was confused regarding whether TypePad and Movable Type are actually the same thing, with one being a hosted version of the other. Searches on this subject came up with articles (example) talking about how Six Apart, the company that makes both TypePad and Movable Type has some conflicts of interest, and there seems to be concern in the MT community regarding how much more effort Six Apart is going to put into Movable Type now that they have TypePad. As I’ve finally set up a MT blog for my travel guides site using Movable Type 3.0 hosted on my dedicated server, I can now say that while the interfaces are quite similar, Movable Type and TypePad are NOT the same thing. As you can see on my trip report site, I’m having trouble mucking around with the templates. And remember, TypePad charges per month even for only 1 blog. If you have 3 or less blogs, Movable Type is free. But it is VERY difficult to modify the templates that are provided with it (and there aren’t other sets packaged with it to choose from, like with TypePad). You can find free templates for Movable Type on the web, but even those are hard to figure out and customize. There’s gotta be an easier way. Not to mention that the templates that Movable Type installs with do not even create Category Archives — you need to modify the main page’s template yourself to add a list of Categories, and the posts themselves don’t even list their category — now what’s the point of the category if they’re not going to set the product up to use it w/o requiring users to muck around so deep in the templates? Hopefully I’ll be a lot better at Movable Type soon, thanks to Elise Bauer’s Learning Movable Type blog. She has a very informative article comparing Movable Type to TypePad, which sort of sums up what I’ve started to think all along — TypePad is MUCH simpler to use to just get your blog up and running — but if you already have web hosting company, and don’t want to pay an additional monthly fee OR if you want to run a more customized, robust blog, Movable Type has tons of plugins that provide additional functionality and while the learning curve is surely much steeper (now I’ve got to delve into CSS so I can understand how to make the templates, even?), the power it provides users with is almost limitless in comparison to TypePad. On the other hand, it does make TypePad a good choice for my blog on How to Blog since the point was that initially I didn’t know how to do it and I got this up and running pretty quickly, with the caveat that I still can’t get the ‘banner’ portion to display all the text of my blog description, and that portion renders oddly on many browsers, including IE 6. But here I am, w/o knowing how to make a blog, blogging away. I will say that it will NOT be my platform of choice for any future blogs. I’d rather put the effort in and learn a more robust, customizable system, as overwhelming as that seems right now.

Another post I found on TypePad vs Blogger focuses more on the visual aspect of the design interfaces, and clearly chooses TypePad as its preference. Interestingly, that site is powered by Movable Type.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m creating this site in TypePad, but I’m noticing I’m really missing some things that blogger has and TypePad doesn’t.

First of all, Blogger let’s you edit the actual HTML of your post, which is a big plus for advanced users - why is this missing in TypePad?? UPDATE: you can type HTML straight into TypePad’s edit post form and it will interpret it (although not necessarily the way you expect, as you can see by clicking the above link — interestingly, when I previewed that post the text that says it should be red was - but when I published the blog the text color remained unchanged - same for the line that’s SUPPOSED to be centered) - if you’re going to do this, you should probably go to the advanced section when posting and choose Text Formatting of ‘None’

And now for the Things I Like Better about Blogger’s ‘Create Post’ interface (assuming that one is not going to edit the HTML, so we’re just comparing the UI for creating posts btwn Blogger and TypePad here:

Blogger has far more formatting choices available to you, much like a regular word processor would. What’s so special that Blogger has and TypePad is missing?

- Bulleted Lists (which are indented, something I tried to accomplish by blockquoting this list created with hyphens, but it turns out that TypePad then puts all of the info in the same line and does not process the line breaks)

- Text Alignment (ability to center a portion of text, etc)

- Numbered Lists

- (this one’s a biggie….) ABILITY TO CHANGE FONT SIZE WITHIN A POST

- ability to change text color

- hell, just the ability to change the font being used so that the line above could have been Times New Roman and this line could’ve been Arial. Or whatever - changing fonts mid-post. Am I not the only one who sees these things as critical features?

So Blogger can make much posts that look more like what you want them to look like - and make them more easily. Their standard UI makes customizable formatting within posts a snap! UPDATE: TypePad now has rich text editing when you compose your post, so it is now on par with Blogger’s UI for post creation with the exception of the ability to change fonts w/in a post. For that, you’ll need to edit the HTML - another thing that TypePad finally allows you to do.

PLUS, the edit field in which you enter the text for your post is so much easier to read on Blogger’s site than on TypePad (no longer true - TypePad’s improved edit field is fantastic). Not to mention that if you want to host your blog elsewhere, and still use Blogger’s easy interface, you can! It will FTP your blog to your hosting provider. Or, if you don’t have one, it will host it for you at blogspot for free!

But Blogger doesn’t have a Category field, and for my purposes (actually a blog other than this one - this is my blog about me learning how to blog…), I *NEED* a Category field.

Blogger also does not support TrackBacks, which are one of the best ways of getting links to your site to appear on other sites that you’ve linked to and of letting sites you’ve linked to know you’re talking about them (and vice versa). Without Categories or TrackBacks, I’d only recommend Blogger to the absolute newbie who wants the cheapest (aka free), easiest, fastest way to start blogging without having to know anything about html, css, etc.

Is there any app that gives users the best of both worlds??? At this point, I’ve spent some time fiddling with both TypePad and Blogger, and neither of them gives me all of the features and customizability that I need in a single package.

Incidentally, I read an article somewhere that said that Yahoo was devaluing sites that used Google’s AdSense code in their pages (essentially punishing publishers for any affiliation with yahoo’s biggest competitor, google). As a result, another issue that’s burning in my mind is whether Google gives ranking preferences to sites which are hosted on BlogSpot (which they own) over those hosted on their competitors like TypePad?

Latest update: Does anyone have any comments on b2evolution?

David Dorward has an article on Replacing Movable Type - he will either be going with b2evolution or Word Press

It seems that I’m fairly late to the blogging game, and much of the Movable Type community is outraged that Six Apart has taken what was once FREE software and is now charging for it. Whilst a commercial license is not that expensive if you have 5 authors or less ($199) and allows for unlimited blogs, this was once free and now it’s not.

Mark Pilgrim wrote an entire article about why users should use WordPress instead of Movable Type

And I just came across a post from another person who chose WordPress over MovableType, after starting out with Movable Type. As you can see from the comments on his page, there are many others who feel WordPress, combined with its plugins, is simply the best blogging tool out there.

As you can see from my other posts on WordPress, I can confirm that installation takes 5 minutes(it is almost a joke in how easy it is to set up!) and the customization of categories, with sub-sub-sub categories, strong development community, full trackback support, customizable pings, and plug-ins that allow you to choose between static or dynamic pages may make WordPress my tools of choice, too. We shall see. We shall see…