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Kevin Sandlin

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Managing a WordPress site and writing in WordPress are two very different things.  I’ve enjoyed the simplicity and power of plugins managing Atlanta Tech Blogs using a simple, cheap WordPress framework with a dozen or so plugins.  It works.

But writing in WordPress isn’t cutting it for me.  That, among a couple of other reasons, is why as of yesterday’s obligatory 2014 review post, I am back to blogging using my original favorite, Blogger. In fact, it just hit me today that I started blogging 10 years ago using Blogger as my wife and I traveled to Kazakhstan to adopt our son and daughter. It’s good to be back.

The other, more mechanical and practical reasons for switching back to Blogger from WordPress, after doing exactly the opposite last May, are three:

  • My blog was getting lost in the stream of Atlanta Tech Blogs posts
  • My SEO and readership were far better as a standalone blog 
  • I like the WordPress admin UI, but not the writing UI, even with WP v4.1

Re-reading that old post from 8 months ago, I had landed on “In the end, it’s the themes and plugins that did it for me” as the sum of all reasons for moving over to WP; however, it was John Saddington’s epic essay offering deep advice for starting (or restarting) a blog that brought me back to why I really do prefer Blogger for writing.  If you have not yet read that post, I highly recommend that you do it today, especially if you are even considering blogging at all ever.

One of my remaining issues with Blogger is that the product really has not changed much, if at all, in the 10 years I’ve been using it. Odd, but then like I said in the May 2014 post: Google made Ev Williams (Twitter co-founder) wealthy, and then promptly put the product on a shelf.  It’s this blogger’s opinion that Google has (a) done a huge disservice to the blogging community, (2) missed out on a massive opportunity that WordPress has capitalized on (CMS), and (3) left their content creation machine in the weeds in favor of Google+.

No matter. The UI is good for me, and I agree with @Saddington that writing is the most important part of blogging, not the tech around your writing. So, as of yesterday’s first post of 2015, I’m back on Blogger to write, and staying with WordPress to manage.

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