Blogger vs. WordPress shows up all the time on Yahoo! Answers, and I try to answer based on what I think the asker’s criteria might be. If what they want, above all else, is Spending No Money, I send them to Blogger, on the basis that I don’t want to have to explain why WordPress.com might cost them a few bucks now and then, and a self-hosted WordPress will cost them quite a few more.

On the other hand, if the choice is between Blogger and a self-hosted WordPress, I need only point them to this presentation by local designers CooperHouse, which considers ten criteria, six of which favor WP, three Blogger, and one that’s a wash. (Disclosure: CooperHouse’s own site runs on WordPress, though it’s a custom design rather than a standard theme.)

On the question of search-engine optimization, they give the nod to Blogger, on the following not-unreasonable basis: “Google indexes Blogger within 24 hours; Google indexes WordPress within 4 weeks.” Inasmuch as Google owns Blogger, the stuff’s presumably right there for them to grab. On the other hand, I’ve beaten that 4-week period for WordPress by three weeks, six days, twenty-three hours and forty-six minutes, though I’m in no position to say whether this is at all typical.

Roberta X, not happy with the new Blogger interface, pulled off a successful rollback — temporarily, anyway. She remains not happy:

I quite dislike the new UI. I’m no good at real HTML and formatting in the new near-WYSIWYG editor baffles me.

When Blogger pulls the rug out from under for good, I am not going to mess with it if it becomes too annoying.

Can we talk her into migrating to WordPress? I’ll call this a No:

I have a WordPress backup — which I kept updated until Google/Blogger, as is their right, decided to pull the plug on that — and I’m not happy with WP’s UI, either.

I’ve made my peace with WP, mostly by avoiding the clunk-o-matic Visual Editor whenever possible; I’m no HTML genius — it says “Bad Example” right over there in the sidebar — but I’ve been doing it long enough to have developed something vaguely resembling technique.

And speaking of Blogger, they sent me a nastygram yesterday to the effect that my old account, used only to maintain a profile, needed to be migrated into the Google hivemind post haste or else. I made two attempts at this. The first errored out; the second, in which I made a point of not checking the “I have read the Terms and Conditions” box, breezed through the system in milliseconds. Lesson learned.

I’d puzzled over one particular quandary for several days, and finally found an answer at Nicole’s:

I had no idea but apparently there is something happening with WordPress that makes commenting a difficult runaround for some folks. It seems it is largely being seen by folks who have Gravatars.

The workaround, of course, is unnecessarily complicated.

Oddly, the first place I ran into a problem with this was Equestria Daily, which runs on Blogger. But they’ve secretly replaced the regular Blogger commenting system with IntenseDebate, which, like Gravatar and WordPress, is another Automattic product.

No one’s reported a problem commenting here, perhaps because I’m not hosted at WordPress.com, or because I go to the trouble of suppressing Gravatars.

An interesting bit from the host’s newsletter:

We’ve tried to give you so much more than the standard, out-of-the-box WordPress experience because we wanted you to understand just how powerful and pretty it could be.

To that end we’ve had our One-Click WordPress installer throw in a bunch of themes from Automattic.com (WordPress’s online parent) as well as some standard plugins to get you up and running with as little legwork required on your part as possible.

And some folks no doubt appreciate that. But then:

Turns out a lot of you just ended up deleting all of those helpful add-ons and grew quite frustrated in the process. That makes total sense because some people prefer cookie dough ice cream with sprinkles, and some people ONLY WANT VANILLA, DAMNIT.

It’s not just the flavoring, either. If you have fifty themes on site and someone manages to sneak some illicit code onto the premises, there are 49 directories it can use where you’re never going to look.

So they’ve modified the installer, and now they shovel out the extra goodies only if you check the Deluxe box. I recommend that you not do so: there’s plenty of time to mess up your site yourself without having to let the robot installer do it for you.

Something I hadn’t noticed until now: if I go into the Comments section and hover over the URL proffered by the commenter, WordPress goes out and fetches a screenshot of what’s there at the moment — provided, of course, there’s something there; various alphabet-soup URLs showing up in the spam trap produce nothing at all.

I tell you, there’s nothing quite as hazardous to your train of thought as the sudden appearance of a window in the middle of the screen which displays, oh, let’s say, urinarytractinfectionhomeremedies.info, a site which sought to glom a single-line blurb onto a piece about funny Wi-Fi names. And it occurs to me that “Urinary Tract Infection Home Remedies” might actually make a good name for a Wi-Fi network, if only because you’d expect something like that about as much as you’d expect the Spanish Inquisition, which of course nobody does.

There is no official WordPress file with the name main.css in the wp-includes directory.

I mention this because I found one in my wp-includes directory, and it looks highly suspicious. (It has, of course, been removed.)

The passing of Steve Jobs has inspired Stuart Brown and the WordPress gang to assemble a Retro Mac theme, which I have installed on the backup site because — well, why the heck not? (I briefly entertained the idea of dropping it here, but decided against it out of, um, brand-management considerations. Yeah. That’ll work.)

I must point out here that not everyone is inclined to mourn the fellow, who by all accounts was, let us say, a bit difficult. Then again, so am I, to far less effect.

I have never had occasion to make use of the WordPress Media Library: I’d been running this site for over a decade before I even thought about WordPress, and hell, FTP has always worked for me.

We will stipulate, for the sake of this excerpt, that the Library is somewhat cumbersome:

[Matt] Mullenweg admitted that it is confusing and gets difficult to manage once you have lots of images in the library. A man in the audience brought up a technical issue he had with the library. Mullenweg explained that you could actually do what the man wanted to in WordPress but stated: The software is wrong, not the people.

You will never hear a quote like that from [name of damn near any software company anywhere].

And as The Director points out:

I’ve seen too many defects called “training issues,” wherein a non-existent trainer was projected to teach users the convoluted workarounds necessary to avoid bug-infested dark corners of the application. But the motto above, the software is wrong, not the people, nails it, too.

The bug-free program, to the extent that it’s more complex than 10 PRINT “Hello world!”, does not exist. However, we poor, benighted end users hate to be told that we’re doing it wrong when it turns out that the program itself is doing it wrong.

WordPress Head of Bug Creation (says so right here) Matt Mullenweg crows a little bit, and who can blame him?

As noted on TNW and Adweek, yesterday [10 July] we passed over 50,000,000 websites, blogs, portfolios, stores, pet projects, and of course cat websites powered by WordPress.

On the stats page Mullenweg quotes there’s this parenthetical note: “we host about half.”

Now comes this announcement for the other half:

After more than a million downloads of WordPress 3.2, we’re now releasing WordPress 3.2.1 into the wild.

Do the math. This is an admission, albeit oblique, that close to 24 million WordPress users are still using versions prior to 3.2.

No wonder they nag you in the Dashboard. (Unless, of course, you’re using a really old version which lacks the nag feature.)

Disclosure: I installed 3.2.1 last night.

So I did the WordPress 3.2 installs yesterday, and for some reason I probably don’t want to know, the All! New! Dashboard! informed me that my browser (Firefox 3.6.18, if you must know) was in desperate need of being upgraded.

The coders were at least prescient enough to sneak a small “Dismiss” link into the box, though they could have saved three bytes by simply calling it “FOAD.” It was a closer match to my attitude, anyway.

Lore Sjöberg finds a yummy metaphor for his CMS travails:

I keep hearing that Drupal can do things that WordPress can’t, but I haven’t reached that point yet. I’ve just reached the point where Drupal can do things WordPress can, but in an incredibly more obtuse and somewhat less reliable way. If Blogger is a pre-assembled gingerbread house, and WordPress is a set of pre-cut gingerbread panels, frosting, assorted decorative candy, and an instruction manual, Drupal is a bag of flour, two eggs and a map to the nearest grocery store.

I once (and once is enough) built a blog on Lotus’ Domino platform, which, extending the metaphor, includes a picture of the old Nutrition Pyramid and a Jack in the Box store-locator app. Trini, more talented than I, actually managed to build one using a WordPress theme in less time than it took me to regrow the hair I pulled out trying to get the variables to work.

And you’ll notice nobody dares mention TypePad.

Must life be so gosh-darn difficult?

All I ever wanted in life was for WordPress to update both Facebook and Twitter whenever I posted new blogs. You hear that, universe? You can take back the money, the fame, the women … okay, there haven’t been that many women, but point being, this should be unbelievably simple to do! It’s just text!

I have never tried to automate FB updates, and if there’s going to be wailing and/or gnashing of teeth if I try, I can do without.

More to the point, I see the blog readers, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers as three separate audiences — although obviously there’s some overlap here and there — and I’m not sure I want to give them exactly the same stuff. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.)

One major difference: the people at whom I tweet might occasionally look at a blog post, so I duly send up (via an automated tool, natch) a “Newly posted” tweet at the appropriate moments. There are Facebook friends who have no idea that I even have a blog. And why spoil it for them at this point?

The search box over in the sidebar might get some use from you guys, but it probably gets a lot more from me, as I try to see what else I might have said on a subject.

While doing that sort of research Monday, I found a couple of old posts which didn’t bring up the topic desired at all — but which, when served up by the Big G, contained extraneous information that happened to match the search. These were static pages; I sent up fresh copies, just in case. And then I went looking for a reason why.

Turns out that last week someone managed to drop a bogus redirect for search engines into .htaccess, and directed it to an encoded php command hiding in a little-used directory. I had WordPress pretty well locked down, but I’m thinking the problem was with FTP. It took me about two minutes to find the offending code and trash it. Passwords and such, of course, are being adjusted.

Last night, I was insane enough to take on a Yahoo! Answers question about WordPress. The guy’s automatic update failed on an out-of-memory error, and he wanted to know what he could do about it. I made a suggestion or two, with the proviso that if these don’t work, he may have to do actual manual updates.

He reacted to that latter idea as though I’d suggested he slay the Nemean Lion. We’re talking sheer, abject fear: it got to the point where he was asking me to get on his PC using one of those remote-viewing gizmos and run it for him. Not being completely insane, I declined, and suggested that he export all his posts and import them into a WordPress.com freebie, where at least they do all the maintenance. Eventually he calmed down a bit, and admitted he was at 3.0.4, only one version behind.

It occurs to me, though, that if you can’t bear the thought of driving, there’s very little point in paying for a car.

So I popped open the WordPress admin, and while they hadn’t offered me the 3.0.4 update, there was an update for a plugin, so I went out to fetch that.

And the moment it was done, up popped the 3.0.4 link. I did the update and went on to another site. They hadn’t offered the 3.0.4 update, but there was an update for a plugin — a different plugin this time — so I went out to fetch that.

A third site, a third different plugin, but the same result. Still, things could have been a lot worse.

Just did the WordPress 3.0.1 update. As is becoming the rule, the database backup takes about 12 times longer than the actual upgrade. Not that I’m inclined to skip said backup, which is now approaching 9 mb gzipped.

As always, if anything is broken, yell. I would.

There is now a Vuvuzelator plugin for WordPress.

Disclosure: I happily use several of Ozh’ plugins, but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

It’s the official release date for WordPress 3.0, project name “Thelonious,” and my first response was a plaintive tweet: “So, is #wordpress 3.0 going to break all my themes?”

Upon receiving assurance that no, it is not, I proceeded to the next step, which is backing up the database. Right now, it’s about 30 mb, and the gizmo that automates the process for me gzips it down to 8.7 or so. I looked at what I’d gotten, and frowned: 363k? Backup fail of some sort. I tried again half an hour later, and this time it worked.

And only then did I attempt the actual conversion to 3.0, which took about 90 seconds, 70 seconds of which was waiting for wordpress.org to fork over the archive of core files.

As always, if you see something broken before I do, please bring it to my attention.

Smitty reveals some of the secrets of maintaining a WordPress blog:

I ratcheted down my resolution to 800X600 and confirmed the email reports that, yes, this blog is slammed to the left side of the screen.

To work on this, I save the blog locally, open that copy in the browser, get out the BFH, and tweak the .css.

Except that there is enough voodoo in the .css for the page to thumb its nose at me. So your indulgence is sought. I’m still standing up my local LAMP stack so I can break this thing in a blatantly irresponsible manner without any anguished screams peeling down at me from out along I-70. One can blog or one can geek, but I know of none doing both simultaneously. Hats off to those who are more graceful task switchers than I.

CSS has pretty much always been voodoo to me; I comprehend maybe twenty-five percent of it on a good day, which for this purpose is defined as “any day I don’t have to bring out the BFH to fix something.” Fortunately, traffic around here is low enough that anguished emails about how farging horrible the site looks are few and far between.

On the other hand, I finally persuaded this ancient theme to accept up-to-the-minute widgets, whereupon I discovered that the widgets I might have actually used, I’ve already essentially duplicated in the sidebar the old-fashioned way.

The newest WordPress is 2.8.5, which among other things fixed this:

There is a script knocking about on the internet at the moment that allows an attacker to run some code that will bring your WordPress blog to its knees. This will more than likely cause your host to get annoyed as well.

What it does: it performs a trackback request to the file wp-trackback.php, but it sends a massive (over 200,000 characters) string that WordPress will take at face value and accept as a legitimate trackback. The first time this is run WordPress will write it to the database, but every time after that it will run a select query to see if the trackback exists. Even though this isn’t a legitimate trackback WordPress will still process it on every request, causing a massive overhead as each large string is processed.

I’m pretty sure I’ve been hit with this at least once. For that matter, there are still people trying to hit the old Movable Type install, which hasn’t been active in over a year.

Then again, I’m just a user and have no idea what I’m doing:

When WordPress was just a small project, the core userbase was made up of developers. Today, I’d guess that 75% of those who use WordPress are end users while 25% are developers. Developers are smart people and they understand how things work. These are the people the 75% rely on for help. What happens if the majority of support these folks offer every single day becomes answers to questions such as simple HTML, uploading via FTP, upgrading, etc. Couple that with the fact that WordPress is becoming more and more user driven meaning the software will continue to be dumbed down to make it as easy as possible for everyone with a voice to make it known on the web and you have a scenario where the developers move on to a new project that has that feeling of being small with the majority of the user base being developers. This would leave the WordPress userbase consisting of not only end users, but fewer people who know the ins and outs which I think would hurt the community over time.

I’m not sure that making the package more comprehensible qualifies as dumbing down, but then I spent half the morning yesterday trying to persuade Lotus Notes to comprehend a WordPress theme, after which I felt fairly dumb.