WordPress, Why did it take me so long?

June 29, 2009 / in Information Technology, Social Media / by Jason Terry

I have been hearing about how great a blogging tool WordPress is. For some reason, it took me a while to see what all the hype is about. I am going to chalk it up to the fact that I already had a gmail account, and blogger was a free service with that account.

So now I have dug in a little bit to WordPress. Bottom line, it is worth all the hype. Implementing a WordPress blog is a straight forward process. The famous 5-minute installation is right here. I use Crystal Tech as my web host, and I highly recommend them. The only problem that I ran into when setting up my WordPress blog is that “index.php” was not set up as a default starting page in IIS. For those of you non-technical readers, this means that when I tried to view the main page of my blog, I got a typically cryptic error message like “403 Forbidden”. You know, the kind of message that makes you want to throw your machine out a window. Anyway, with a reasonably quick call to Crystal Tech support, we got it resolved.

I am blown away at the options and flexibility that I have with WordPress. Blogger has been good to me, but doesn’t hold a candle to WordPress when it comes to the customization and rich development community that keeps WordPress going with new add-ons, etc. I am in the process of getting my default template updated to reflect the Blue Gurus look and feel. Then I will need to move the content over from Blogger to WordPress and update my DNS. Hope to accomplish this in the next two weeks. For now, I am going to continue posting to Blogger. :)