Moving to WordPress

I’ve been blogging at WordPress.com for two years now. I set up Ertblog 2.0 there after becoming frustrated by Typepad, my blog’s original home. I couldn’t believe that Typepad didn’t have an iPad app. I tried Blogsy but it wasn’t the answer.

In a couple of hours on an April Sunday morning, I bought my domain name and set up Ertblog on it with WordPress.com. I had great fun browsing the huge array of themes, but went for Twenty Eleven as I liked its clean appearance.

Two years on, I’ve published over 200 posts. WordPress has proved as good as I’d hoped. The iPad app is great for posting, tracking traffic and reading other blogs. And it’s great on a PC and smartphone too.

One clear (but hardly revelatory) lesson is that the more you post, the more visitors you get. My blog now gets three times as many visits as at the start of the year, after I got back into the habit of regular blogging. My most popular posts have been those that solve problems, such as how to edit GoPro videos with Apple’s iMovie and how to use the BBC iPlayer on Apple TV.

WordPress makes it easy to create good-looking blogposts that mix words and images. In two years, I’ve only once found it hard to display photos properly – and that was yesterday, when I tried to post two photos in line in my post about the Soma and Senghenydd mine disasters. It took repeated reformatting before they appeared as I intended. (It would have been much easier had WordPress had a template into which I could slot the photos.)

Where it began: Typepad

I started blogging on the last day of 2005. This (above) was the image I saw when I chose Typepad. I loved that image of the small child and laptop. Back then, I had neither a laptop or a small child. I’m now a proud father who loves his MacBook. And WordPress…

PS: maybe I should give Blogsy another chance?