I have to admit that I used to think that people who used WordPress for their blogging platform were reminiscent of cult-members on a mission for new recruits. It might have been the blogging crowd I ran with at the time that always brought on the full force of peer pressure to join the WP world.
After using WordPress for a couple of months, I can say that all of the evangelism for the free program is warranted. I host the program on my own server and my hosting company installed it at my direction. (They also handle upgrades, so there’s no need to manually delete and replace old files using FTP).
Before WP, I had used Blogger and the draft version of Blogger and hosting the files on my own servers. After suffering the curse of Blogger users who FTP — long wait times to get new posts to upload — I finally took the plunge and set up my blogs using the WP platform.
The best thing about WordPress its ability to automate many functions that I was manually doing when I was using Blogger. Sitemaps are automatically updated and pings sent to various services when I create a new post. Have a lot of comment spam? The Akismet plug-in takes care of most of it.
Before WP, I wasted time creating my own sitemaps using various programs that required me to upload the sitemaps to my server. I’ll never do that again, but I’ll get all of the benefits of having up-to-date sitemaps.
Using WordPress takes a lot of the tedium away from blogging.
I love writing, but dislike spending lots of time hassling with administrative issues required to ensure Google and other search engines come to visit. It’s great to be freed from the techy chores when they can be done in the background by the software!
WP makes it easier to concentrate on producing great blog content.
