I know some of you were talking about switching to WordPress a while back…I’ve certainly been happy with it, so when I came across a great tutorial for installing WordPress, I thought I’d share. Rachel Cunliffe is a New Zealand-based designer and developer, so in addition to her screencast being very easy-to-follow, her accent makes it fun to listen to, as well!

I didn’t watch to the end of the screencast, I admit, because Firefox was misbehaving memory-wise (as it is prone to do with I have 12-plus tabs open). But based on what I saw, and comments on other blogs, it’s all quite good. I will note that, as she said, every host is a little different when it comes to setting up databases. I use Dreamhost, which is really good and inexpensive, but it doesn’t use “localhost” for the hostname. I basically got it set up through random trial and error and some forum searching. The point is, if you go through Rachel’s instructions and get stuck on the database setup and connection part, don’t give up–check the faq and forums for your host, or contact them directly.

WordPress is so great, though…more layout themes than you can imagine, all of which are fully customizable using php and css…and you don’t really even need to know php or css, because most of the themes are well-documented, making it easy to figure out which parts do what even without knowing the language. For example, I just noticed that there was no “previous page – next page” on this blog, which made it very difficult to, you know, see all the posts. So I looked in a different theme and found some code at the very bottom which included a php command called “posts_nav_link” which sounded promising. I dropped the line of code in my layout, hit refresh, and boom. There it was. That sort of ease of use and unlimited customability is what makes WordPress so awesome. (Note, this does NOT apply to WordPress.com hosted blogs, which have much more limited customization, though the recent update increased how much is customizable by a good bit.)

So yeah, go get WordPressed. (I do have to admit that Blogger is fixing a lot of the issues I had with it in its next upgrade, currently in beta testing. It will have categories–or labels, to keep consistent across Google sites–and the ability to publish individual posts instead of having to republish the whole blog or index. Still, WordPress being open-source, it has a far greater wealth of themes and plug-ins from various designers and developers, so I still recommend it over Blogger.)