How easy to use is your blogging platform?

I am writing this post for two reasons.

One is just to get some content onto my OurManInside.com blog as it has sat dorment for a few months. The other is to pose the question in the title. How easy to use is your blogging platform?

I’ve found myself in a dilemma. I have had the theme Revolution Pro on this WordPress blog for a long time now. I love the way the front page displays a variety of content from throughout the blog and when I update my flickr photos the feed on the front of my blog also changes. I also have a video that’s easy to change. When I remember.

It’s also is hosted & managed by Nik Butler AKA @Loudmouthman so i never have to think about it falling down or needing updating. He is the invisible being that makes this corner of my internet just work.

After seeing Loudmouthman dabbling in Flavors.me I set up my own at flavors.me/documentally. It’s handy to have certain online places aggregate to one page and really simple to set up. That said it does not do everything I am after and sometimes has a strange idea of how content should be formatted.

This is not a new idea.. Over two years ago myself and @Philcampbell used his creation Rezpondr which did very much the same but with more timeline customization and made realtime projects across multimedia platform easy to view in one place.

This year I finally found a fast posting platform I am truly comfortable with in not only it’s simplicity but the way it grows. It is listening to it’s users and growing with them. Posterous has truly revolutionised the way I blog as it’s auto embedding of content with cross posting ability makes it the easiest  platform I have yet used. My Documental.ly Posterous blog (themed by @RichardMackney) has almost entirely taken over  from this wordpress blog.

It’s all about ease of use and that’s mostly down to links being auto embedded, video and audio being hosted & embedded and all this seemlessly working from an email. All it really needs now is a decent back-up system for the masses of content I am pumping into it.

Richard Mackney also made me a hub page at Documentally.com If you are to mention my online places to anyone. please start with www.Documentally.com I am hoping it will always link to a few of my online places.

Bushte.ch, Paynestake.com and Oapedia.org are just a few of my posterous blogs all linked into the same backend content management system.

I haven’t done it yet but apparently I can easily import all my wordpress posts into posterous and was looking  to turn my wordpress theme into a content aggregation system for all my other places. Either this or turn off wordpress altogether. This is a really hard decision as wordpress has been really good to me. Possible because of Nik’s seamless support and that google keeps sending a large number of people here.

This is a small dilemma in the grand scheme of things. Whatever happens I will have to change the theme. I now have to sort out a separately formatted photo (unless i recycle an old one) that will appear on the front page link as well as go through flickr to find a photo to break up this body of text. It is so much more work than is needed compared to the other platforms cropping up at the moment.

I guess I could just post to fewer places to save time.. I would, but Storyfi.com has now made it even easier to filter and feed all the content we sew across our web spaces. Another game changing platform waiting to take off.

Anyway. For the time being I will be mostly at http://Documental.ly until i decide what to do. Unless the Libyans decide to unplug me.

UPDATE:

Actually, not technically an update as I had not yet posted all these questions and ponderings when I called @Loudmouthman who it seems has once again given me all the solutions to my musings. I knew i shouldn’t have Skyped him before I posted. He has almost voided this post with all his answers.

So.. For me to pump life back into the great platform of WordPress, (Nik reminded me of the many benefits Wordpress has over other platforms and I hope he can list a few in the comments below) I need to find a simple two column wordpress theme that will allow my flickr and video content to be featured via widgets. That way i get to keep all the great content that’s archived here and all going well I can cross post from my easy to use posterous into my wordpress pages. So, as Nik has done with Loudmouthman.com (no www.) linking to his blog only and with the www’s is goes to his flavor.me account he has all bases covered.

Phew. I am going to have a lie down in order to formulate a plan of action.

Cheers Nik.. No need to frown.. I got there in the end.

[Another Update]
Woot!.. As you may have noticed I’ve made the switch to a simpler theme and as a result in two days my stats have tripled. Of course an increase in stats if i were selling something would mean more customers but in my case it means more people reading and that less is in fact more when it comes to formatting blogs to help with accessibility.

Thanks again to Nik for the ongoing tweaks to my back-end. *sounds wrong*