Happy New Year everyone! I’m looking forward to 2014 and hope and pray that it’ll be a blessed one for everyone. Like most everyone else I’ve got a few resolutions for 2014 and one of those was to move “back” to WordPress as my blogging solution. Now before you get the pitchforks and start rioting, let me give some context and explain why.
I’m still a SharePoint fan, still love using the product, administering it, and talking and promoting it as well as building solutions using it.
I’ve also used SharePoint as my blogging platform for the past 3yrs since moving over from WordPress originally. I figured it’s best to eat my own dog food since I was really promoting it. But after 3yrs I feel it’s okay if I want to well venture back over to a blogging platform that started out and really at it’s core it’s still that. (WordPress CMS bandwagon folks calm down we’ll get there). Here are a few of the reasons I’ve decided to migrate back to WordPress (at least for now) for my blogging platform.
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Interactive Content
First let me say that my interpretation of Interactive Content may not be exactly what the Web 2.0/3.0 defined standard is.
What I consider interactive content, would be things like polls that I can easily put into a post, a form you can fill out for more information, or signing up for an event, maybe some flash (gasp! it’s not dead yet) or HTML 5 content etc… And sure these can be coded any added into SharePoint, but I find it’s just a lot faster, easier to find a plugin in WordPress where I just add, activate and be on my merry way. Again yes it can be done in SP, but the time factor leans to WP.
Tagging Content
There is a good chance that I wasn’t doing it the right way, but I just never really found the right way to add tags into my posts on SP. I know that in WP 3.7 this is done quickly and easily within the post-new page. Again I never really found it in SP. But again maybe it was just me. Categories seemed to work correctly for both, but with some WP themes including this one I really like how your categories can be configured as Tabs. Do-able in SP, sure, but again I think time factor leans to WP.
…if you build it, they will come.
So what really brought about this change?
I like SharePoint’s blogging features. It’s fairly simple to take a quick thought and format it easily and publish it. So for all intents and purposes it works well. It’s not as easy to toss in an image, but it’s do-able. There’s even a OOB function for comments that works really well. Actually though, that’s my problem. OOB SharePoint 2010 Blog’s don’t have a way to filter out SPAM comments. And as most anyone who has run a blog for a while knows, if you build it, they will come. (Obvious referral to those nefarious Spam Bots). On multiple occasions I’ve found my comments reaching beyond the OOB list view threshold in SharePoint. And when you first notice you’ve got 20 or more comments on your post, you get excited thinking “Wow, I really wrote something good”. Then upon arrival you find poorly worded sentences with links to buy shoes, meds or worse.
When my comment numbers went up drastically I was hoping that my posts were really getting noticed! Obviously they were getting noticed, but by the wrong kind of fan. Grant it, in the technology day we live in, a few spam comments is kinda acceptable. You just go in and clean it out and continue on. But last year on at least 3 separate occasions I found myself attempting to delete thousands of comments. On particular post had acquired 16k comments. It’s not fun trying to delete thousands of rows of comments per post in SharePoint.
Why do spammers place spam links and keywords in your blog comments anyways? I believe it all has to do with SEO. advertising etc.. (I’m open to other thoughts as well). Maybe I’ll save my thoughts on this for another post.
So for now, I’m on the WP platform again. Content is still being fixed from the migration so a link or so here may not be working yet.
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