Both ser­vices are ver­sa­tile, but WP has pulled ahead

Matt Mul­len­weg, CC photo by Robert Scoble

People still ask us all the time which blog­ging plat­form they should use. (Micro-answer: It depends on what’s impor­tant to you.) A few weeks back the team here stared down the issue our­selves when we made the deci­sion to switch Socialmedia.biz from Type­Pad to WordPress.

Why did we do it? Let me explain.

First, a word of praise for Type­Pad. I began blog­ging in May 2001 after inter­view­ing Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Dan Gill­mor on the sub­ject for this piece in OJR. They looked like they were not only hav­ing fun but doing some­thing that mat­tered. So I started on a Manila blog, switched to Mov­able­Type, and then became one of TypePad’s early cus­tomers when Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart rolled out what was then the Mer­cedes Benz of blog­ging platforms.

By that time I was fairly com­fort­able with CSS and Advanced Tem­plates, so the cookie-cutter offer­ings of Blog­ger or Live­Jour­nal never appealed to me. Besides, my blog was evolv­ing from per­sonal com­men­tary about media to a busi­ness focus on social media, and I rechris­tened New Media Mus­ings as Socialmedia.biz in 2005. Type­Pad gave me the abil­ity to design a slick-looking blog with rich, archived con­tent and even some third-party doohick­eys in the sidebar.

But over at Word­Press, a rev­o­lu­tion was brew­ing — and finally reached the point where I could no longer ignore its pull. In WordPress.org, Matt Mul­len­weg (pic­tured above) offered a free, open source plat­form that thou­sands of devel­op­ers were cod­ing for. (We opted for self-hosting rather than the hosted wordpress.com ver­sion.) Some­where between 2007 and 2008, WP became not only com­pa­ra­ble to Type­Pad, but bet­ter. Not because of Matt’s cod­ing prowess, but because of the power of crowd­sourced devel­op­ment. I now find myself attend­ing Word­Press Camps, along­side Bar­Camps, Social Media Camps and other open media efforts born of my involve­ment with Ourmedia.org.

Com­par­i­son: Type­Pad vs. WordPress

Where devel­op­ment had seem­ingly largely stopped at Type­Pad until recently, Word­Press was reg­u­larly rolling out new ver­sions — and ver­sion 2.7 is now the mus­cle car of its class.

Where TypePad’s users were depen­dent on the host­ing ser­vice to roll out new improve­ments, Word­Press opened the door to thou­sands of use­ful, inven­tive plug-ins that would over­whelm any top­down roadmap. Plug-ins (more than 4,200) have sprung up that give blog oper­a­tors an amaz­ing array of pro­gram­ming choices: add a poll, enable users to get com­ment noti­fi­ca­tions by email, show off news briefs, build out your own blog com­mu­nity and thou­sands of other options.

Where TypePad’s com­ments sys­tem was a daily ordeal — bogged down by spam­mers and a kludgy captcha sys­tem — WordPress’s community-powered Akismet brought the Neigh­bor­hood Watch ham­mer down on those knuck­le­heads. Akismet is the most sleek and beau­ti­ful plug-in ever devised.

Where Type­Pad made you hunt and peck to search for an entry when you wanted to update it, Word­Press has a super-useful “Edit this” link attached to each post when the author is logged in. (Manila, my first blog ser­vice, had this a decade ago, which makes its absence on Type­Pad all the stranger.)

Where Type­Pad was still chiefly focused on type, Word­Press enabled a raft of multimedia-rich themes, like the Ele­gant­Themes theme we’re using here. At Socialmedia.biz, we want to cre­ate a blog you can use, not just read.

Where Type­Pad has had some odd twists — some of my cat­e­gory pages ran hun­dreds of items on a sin­gle page, replaced by a cat­e­gory sys­tem that made the older items largely invis­i­ble); when repost­ing mate­r­ial from the Web, Type­Pad inserts tons of extra­ne­ous html char­ac­ters; and Type­Pad briefly had a screwy sys­tem of gen­er­at­ing urls that included the entire first sen­tence of a post in the url — Word­Press lets you slice and dice your con­tent every which way, cleanly. (Dis­clo­sure: I remain grate­ful to the folks at Six Apart, who no doubt sub­si­dized the band­width costs of my blog and its 10,500 entries over the years, even as I paid the annual pre­mium sub­scrip­tion fee.)

And now, with a small team of social media experts join­ing the fold here, Word­Press just feels right for a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort of this kind — and for cor­po­rate solu­tions. Type­Pad remains a strong choice for indi­vid­u­als start­ing their first blog.

If there’s a down­side to Word­Press, it can be this: Given all the cool things you can do — all the gleam­ing eye candy — you may be tempted to do too much. We’re fight­ing that impulse, as we want to take advan­tage of some of those thou­sands of other cool plug-ins out there while keep­ing a watch­ful eye on site performance.

Socialmedia.biz is still a work in progress. But we’ve found our plat­form, and expect to stick with Word­Press for a long, long time.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.