About WordPress

Recently, I blogged about Gravatar, a profile page from Automattic, the owners of WordPress. I was thinking I should mention a few things about WordPress too.

When you sign up for WordPress you can get a blog if you like, but to begin with you get a username, so you can comment on WordPress blogs you follow. And speaking of following… With WordPress you get a blog reader. You can add any blog to it, including ones from Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Tumblr and Blogger. That way you get all the blogs you like to read collected in one place, a dashboard, like on Tumblr.

And as I mentioned before, you also get a Gravater profile.

The blog does display ads, occasionally (if you’re not logged in), but it’s a very good blog platform. You can also upgrade to premium and get a domain name and more space for photos etc.

If you want a blog without ads, you’ll need to upgrade or get your own personal WordPress blog/homepage. Then you’ll need a web hotel and a domain name. That can get a bit complicated unless your web hotel comes with a special service that helps you start a WordPress blog/homepage. We have one, so it wasn’t complicated at all, but I know that setting up databases can be a pain.

WordPress used to be less good at photos and other media than for instance Tumblr. Now it’s a lot better. I can’t say it’s as easy to use as Tumblr when it comes to that kind of thing, but it’s getting there.

What you don’t get on WordPress is as much of a community as Livejournal and Dreamwidth. There’s the Gravatar profile page and the comments and likes (you can even ‘like’ comments), but there aren’t any groups or communities. You can search WordPress for blogs about topics you’re interested in, but I must say it’s been difficult. The search doesn’t work that well. I have used ordinary search engines instead, and then you get all kinds of blogs, regardless of platform. But of course that doesn’t matter, you can still follow them through the blog reader, though you can’t ‘like’, reblog and comment inside the blog reader.