Tell Me Something Tuesday was hosted by Rainy Day Ramblings, but she has (temporarily?) stopped blogging. So a group of us that had been doing posts (Linda from Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell, Karen from For What It’s Worth, Roberta from Offbeat YA, Jen from That’s What I’m Talking About and me) decided to get together, come up with some more topics and keep the meme going.Michelle made us a logo and we’re off and running. For more details, check out this post where I reintroduced the meme.
I can be sporadic, but when I do join in I will always share next week’s topic at the end of the post. So, today is about…
How did you choose your blogging platform?
Well technically I didn’t choose. Michelle did, since this was her blog and she let me join her when I decided blogging solo was no longer in the cards for me. But we both choose to transition to Word Press at about the same time way back when we were newer bloggers on our own blogs. This takes me way back but I feel like I choose WordPress primarily because of the Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin that you could buy from Nose Graze. I loved all the automatic features that came with that – the indexing, the ability to add books via the Goodreads API so easily, the way it would setup my reviews for me, etc. I also think the novice coder in me was really excited about digging into HTML / CSS a bit more and I couldn’t really do that on Blogger. I did a lot more of that back when I was new than I do now – which is funny, because now I actually understand the code a lot better and could definitely do a lot more. WordPress is just super easy for me at this point and I really like all the different plugins that we use without even thinking about it (like my tweet at the bottom of this post) and the commenting features. And I wanted to own my blog – not have someone else (Google/Blogger) in control. If I were to ever start my own blog again (unlikely since I’m very happy co-blogging with Michelle) I would probably just build my own website. I just don’t see the point in starting over right now.
I just went straight to self-hosted wordpress. I don’t know why, I just felt motivated to give it a try lol
I chose WordPress and UBB because that is what Jennifer had on the Book Nympho so I knew it a bit. Plus I could transfer all my existing reviews from the past 3 years.
The UBB plug in is amazing. I don’t have the knowledge or time to dig into the codes (I did when I very first started and got so frustrated). I love just having something easy to use and simple.
(I CHOSE Blogger of course. LOL)
You can code in Blogger as well, but maybe it’s different with WP? I don’t know. I choose Blogger because free WP didn’t let me tweak my template, and I can’t afford paying for stuff/only use my credit card if it’s absolutely necessary (I’m afraid of getting my little money stolen…).