Saturday, April 19, 2014

Time to Make a Pressing Change To The Blog

For the last several years, I’ve written a blog just for fun; said blog, which I entitled Carlisle’s Chaotic Commentary, was hosted by Blogger (owned by Google). Over the last few months, I’ve become increasingly displeased with Blogger’s Dashboard. It hangs, freezes and also has gotten to the point where I have to manually edit the HTML code to get the page to display correctly. This became increasingly irritating for me since I switch between using my laptop and my Surface 2 tablet and trying to edit code on the tablet’s smaller screen (and without a mouse) can be a pain in the ass.
Also, since I’m now a subscriber to Microsoft’s Office 365, I wanted to find something that worked well with Word 2013’s built in Share feature specifically the “Post to blog” option. My attempts at doing this with Blogger proved to be less than exciting.
So, this past Friday, since I had the day off from work and had the spare time, I decided to register for a free Word Press account. I spent a couple of hours posting test blogs both manually and using the Post to blog feature in Word and I’m pretty happy with the results. Going forward, I’ll be blogging using Word and posting to Word Press instead of Blogger.
Granted, Blogger is 100% free, while certain features in Word Press only work if you subscribe to a paid account1, but even so, Word Press (so far) has been more user friendly than Blogger has been lately.
For that matter, I’m also planning on researching the possibility of migrating data from Google to Microsoft Live. It’s odd to think it, but lately I’ve gotten to where I’d rather trust and use Microsoft’s cloud features than Google’s; perhaps it’s because I own both a laptop and a tablet running Windows 8.1. *wink*
If you are reading this on the Blogger site, thanks, but this will be the last post on http://jecarlisle.blogspot.com. If you’re reading this on the new Word Press version (http://jecarlisle13.wordpress.com), thanks for stopping by and I’ll work on getting more stuff posted here soon.
~ JC
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1.    For example, I can’t do much in the way of customizing the layout in Word Press using only a free account and the choice of templates is rather limited as well.