etc.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect it to be that easy.

Here’s where I’m going with the whole WordPress thing. As you may or may not know, etches-johnson.com used to be composed of a bunch of different blogs – there was etc. (the main blog), books, film, the linklog, and KnitPics. I’ll happily admit now that I was never fond of that arrangement, it felt awfully artifical to me — a clunky workaround to deal with Blogger’s lack of categories. What I really wanted was a way to display all these “blogs” as categories in linear-chrono format (not that nightmare 3-column incarnation I had going on last year) on one page. What I really wanted was categories, and I was getting pretty tired of making excuses for Blogger for not having them (and having to resort to clunky workarounds).

So I started investigating a couple of options. I looked closely at Movable Type, Greymatter, Textpattern, and this one, WordPress. I eliminated Greymatter pretty early on since there didn’t seem to be a lot of support for the product (I could be wrong — that was simply the impression I got from reviewing the website). I passed on MT mostly because the documentation just plain scared me, and their new license structure did nothing to endear their product to me. (In most other situations, when a product has 100s of pages of support/help/faq documentation, I take that to be a good thing. And I’m sure it’s a very good thing with MT too, I just knew that I probably wasn’t ready for something that needed that much know-how to deal with, considering that my working knowledge of MySQL and PHP is nonexistent.)

It came down to Textpattern and WordPress for me and let me be the first to admit — as excited as I am to dip my toes into the enticing world of programming, I was ultimately wooed by the WordPress “5 minute Installation” promise, which was a far cry from Textpattern’s admission that: “there is nothing plug-and-play about Textpattern, yet”. It just sort of felt like WordPress presented a natural course of progression from the total-dependence-solution that Blogger provided (that I have been mosly happy with for 2.5 years).