Wednesday, August 20, 2008

i want to write but i'm mental-blocked

hold on, is "mental-blocked" even a proper phrase (or compound word or whatever)?

i got home early today because the office declared a semi-half-day, which pegged quitting time at 3pm. so i've been spending enough time on the internet clicking on the usual suspects, and i was running out of stuff to read. i did come across baddie's post this afternoon, which prompted me to think of my own rainy day pet peeves, which in turn reminded me that i almost had another klutz incident this morning.

...

(stopped current train of thought because it's getting really lame.)

...

then i came across jewel's blog, and i am reminded again of another dilemma of sorts.

ever since i decided to create my latest blog at wordpress.com, i've been (un)seriously contemplating migrating my main blog from blogspot. sentimentality aside, i am reluctant to move from blogspot because it is the only one that provides an email backup of my posts as they are published. and in my experience, the sidebar html widget is much more user-friendly than wordpress html widget. i was seriously pissed that this was the only site i could show off my last.fm artists and recent playlist using the flash widgets - multiply, lj and wordpress failed massively. and my plurk widget only worked here. in fact, blogger wins at widgets, period.

however, wordpress (and i'm using the free hosted one) has a lot going for it as well. it has more themes (blogger is seriously lacking in themes); there are "pages" which are similar to posts except that they aren't constricted by the date; there's a cool spam filter; there are "categories" and "tags"; and it's compatible with gravatar. the clincher, however, is the "read more" (or "summary") option (though i have to admit livejournal is one-up with the lj-cut). installing this option in blogger takes a bit of patience, some css knowhow, and a lot of hits and misses.

there are a few things that aren't found on either platform which i really really like, such as lj's multiple userpic (i haven't used up all 15, and my lj friends have lots and lots more on their paid accounts). lj also has a nifty lj user graphic, such as this one:[info]under_crisis. it also has several fields besides the post title and tags, such as music, location and mood (and moodthemes are customizable!) and all of these can be specified if you emailed your blog post. best of all is the lj-cut, which allows the author to hide several non-continuous portions of the post.

expert bloggers have probably worked around my complaints and devised how their platforms could work for them. but i'm no expert, and i don't have the patience to get into the nitty gritty programming. so i'll just keep on wishing that someday blogger will create their version of the lj-cut, and i'll be the happy camper forever. or until the next hot platform comes along.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Personally, I think the themes on Wordpress are more aesthetically pleasing and take hardly any effort.

I just migrated from my Multiply blog to Wordpress naman. Haha. Wordpress was the first thing that came to mind so I dove right in without thinking about the stats and specs and whatnot.

But you're right. I want a Plurk widget, too. :(

undercrisis said...

you brought up a very nice feature of WP, which are the stats. which i hardly use anyway. haha.