I have been using WordPress since January and overall generally happy. Initially the ability to customize any aspect of the software was a hindrance since it required time to tinker to get things right. Then over time I got my WordPress site to be in some ways better than my Typepad one. The effort involved wasn’t trivial, but I enjoyed the tinkering. Once the site was right it has become an annoyance to deal with plugin updates, WordPress updates, etc. I know my Typepad subscription is up near the end of the year so I wanted to keep using WordPress to see if I would be comfortable enough to delete my Typepad account when the time came. I mean I hadn’t updated Typepad since January.
A few other annual subscriptions are up around now so I got thinking about what my plans are for everything. I was set to ditch Typepad all together since it would save some cash, but decided to check out their changes while looking at my current WordPress setup. My conclusion was mixed. I think overall I like both systems. They each have their advantages. The deciding factor was for some reason the performance on my hosting site I use was apparently really slow recently. Significantly so that I noticed it affecting page load times. That little thing made me realize why it is worth it to pay for an application suck as Typepad. I don’t host it, i dont’ fix it, I just use it. I like tinkering with the look and feel, but don’t want to deal with performance and stability and updates, etc. In the end I will stick with Typepad. I have used it for almost 5 years now. It just works.
That being said I spent the better part of this afternoon porting posts since January from WordPress back to Typepad. The migration process works, but is not as clean as I would have liked. Tags in WordPress show up as Categories in Typepad. That required some work. Then severing my domain hosting accounts hooks into my Powerz.org domain took some work since they controlled the DNS. After a DNS server migration my mail and blog are now safely working again. Now I have to wait for Google to rebuild my site index. Their goes my page rank’s but it isn’t the first time I have done that. Now lets see if I don’t want to change my mind again in 6 months. The reality is both systems are good, but I am happy where I am, and don’t want to mess with easy upkeep.