The more I use WordPress, the more impressed I am. It’s easy to use, powerful, highly configurable, and there’s hundreds of add-ons. This blog switched to using WordPress a few weeks back. It allows me to concentrate on the blogging, rather than tech details. However, if it’s geek stuff you like, then jump on in. WordPress is open source and you can tweak it as much as you want.
One real nice add-on is Askimet. It stops comment and trackback spam. Just ftp one file to your WordPress site, and Askimet will check all comments and trackbacks multiple ways, then mark the spam for you. Nice, and it’s free (for smallish blogs.)
To use Askimet you need a WordPress.com API key. To get one, go to WordPress.com and enter your email address. If you pass the mystic test, you will get back an email saying
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away you entered your email address on http://wordpress.com/ to get a blog.
We’re now inviting small groups to use WordPress.com and your email address was selected today!
Your API key will be included. Go to your current WordPress blog (not the new one), install Akismet, enter the API key, and bingo, they promise no more spam. Nice. I’m using it here.
And along with the API key, you get a free blog hosted at WordPress.com. Here’s mine, just a few posts now, however it’ll be growing. I plan to make it a personal blog. Check back often.
Note: WordPress, the blog software, is hosted at WordPress.ORG. The API key and hosted blog is at WordPress.COM.
Technorati tag: WordPress
Hey, Bob, I see you recently made the Radio to WordPress switch as well.
My question is what did you do about your old comments? I am looking around for a way to get my comments out, but I have yet to find a resource. Did you find a good way to get your comments from Radio into WordPress?
And, by the way, Akismet is the bomb! I love it.
My Radio comments were in Haloscan. Still are! There appeared no easy (or even hard) way to convert, so I just left the Radio blog as it was and re-published it here to an archive. So, all the Haloscan comments still work fine.
In re-publishing Radio to a folder different from where it was before, I discovered (after I did it) that all the links to images in a post were broken because Radio uses absolute paths not relative paths. So I manually re-edited all of them. Aargh. Took about 12 hours.
A LOT of people are going from Radio to WordPress lately. Scoble was the big one. Many others are too.
I did read about the absolute versus relative path problem for images in Radio. I am pretty much unaffected, as I used Flickr or some other location to host my blog images, and I would just link to the image. Sorry to hear it took you so long to redo those posts.
I found the export to MT feature of exporter.root to work quite nicely in importing my old stuff. Comments, on the other hand, is going to be painful. I also need to work on my sidebar. I do like WP alot.
Scoble was one of the big ones, but I have to admit WP is nice. I just like how nice you can make the blog look, and how snappy it is versus the occasional lag I would experience with Radio.