Pros and Cons of Wordpress Posting
As far as blog software goes, I think WordPress is pretty great. It’s open source, has a cool logo and is highly configurable. It’s also the only system I know …. because I would rather write stuff than learn about all the different blog software out there, each system with it’s own quirks and rules. Posting through the WordPress web interface has become a bit tedious though.
PRO
- post from anywhere
- image uploader is nice to have
- post preview displays exactly as it will on the site
- fabulous documentation in the Codex
- XML-RPC interface, compatible with MovableType api
CON
- post preview is far from the source text, so the preview workflow is slow
- lack of AJAX means lots of waiting for the preview to load
- by default posts are tagged as “Uncategorized,” and no warning when I forget to tag. This is more annoying than it sounds.
- the “Uncategorized” tag apparently can’t be deleted
- fully manual HTML, no help with image, href, or other tags.
So I’ve been doing my last few posts with ecto a client side blogging program for Mac and Windows. This is a big improvement over using the web interface, although Ecto is a bit clunky as well (feature overload).
Link to ecto blogging software.
Filed under: Uncategorized, bobslobster |
there’s actually a rich text editor with Wordpress that you can use if you don’t want to handcode your HTML (You turn it on by going to Options –> Writing and then checking “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” where it says “Formatting.” I’d turned it off for Raj last week so that he could install a plugin that would render his code samples properly. (yep the code workaround is a big pain) I think you can turn the rich text editor back on if you aren’t doing a post with code samples.
also, wrt to “tags,” they’re actually supposed to be”categories” in wordpress (so we’re not really using their system for what it was designed for). It’s really subtle but the systems for using categories vs. taags are designed a little different based on what people are supposed to use them for.
Categories are meant to be like the big signs at the supermarket (i.e. Dairy, Produce etc). They’re the big buckets that don’t change. Tags are keywords that help you remember what something was about and can be highly specific - they’re like the labels on specific items.
I think you can install a plug in (ie Ultimate Tag Warrier) that makes it a lot easier to use a tagging system (a la de.li.cious or flickr) - there’d be no default “uncategorized” tag in that case.
oh and i agree, it would be nice if we could delete the “uncategorized” category…you can change the default category that something gets posted to but that’s not a whole lot better.
What if we just changed the WordPress code to automatically un-select ‘Uncategorized’ if any other categories are selected?
OK, I made WordPress pop up a confirmation warning if ‘Uncategorized’ is still selected when you try to publish or save a post.
Cool! Reminders about categories are a good thing.
I agree that we’re not using categories the way the wordpress developers probably envisioned. But that’s because categories suck. It’s all about tags! :-)
Categories, as May describes them, sound like non-overlapping tags. Since the WP developers allow a post to have multiple categories, I don’t see the difference between WP categories and tags.
hmm…that’s true. i guess the supermarket analogy isn’t a good one. i think categories then are more broadly understood buckets that you can dump things into and tags are specific labels that you can apply. I guess I also associate tagging with a more ajaxy-predictive interface.
tags seem to be really useful for images (as with flickr) but not so much with text entries. if you have a good search engine, they don’t really seem necessary. a while back i used to keep my bookmarks organized by categories…and then, i switched over to del.icio.us and started using tags. i find that my really long list of tags and even the tag map on del.icio.us is less useful in helping me find stuff than the categories.
Yay! Now I get it :)
Speaking of search engines.. how come a WP search box isn’t exposed on the TR front page?
There is a plugin out there that “AJAX-ifies” WordPress. I haven’t tried it but it looks cool. Not sure how much difference it makes on the backend, though. I’ve also been trying to find (for Rachele) a good linux client-side posting application. Everything I’ve found so far is fine for posting and editing text, but requires you to manually upload and hyperlink images, which is not the epitome of convenience. Really this problem should already have been solved in a standard XMLRPC way.
special thanks!