Delaying a Switch to Wordpress

So after a short stint on Blogger, I've been considering a switch to Wordpress. One of the more annoying things about Blogger is that there really isn't an easy way to implement tags or categories. Wordpress has categories built in, and given how easy it is to add in plugins, with something like Ultimate Tag Warrior, it's fairly easy to get tags up and running too. Given the general good press surrounding Wordpress, I though I'd give it a try.

Of course, Wordpress.com is banned in China. Wordpress.org is still up and running, but unlike the Blogger / Blogspot relationship, it doesn't allow me to access the Wordpress.com blog I set up. Ecto doesn't work either, which I guess is for the same reason. Furthermore, I can't even login via proxy. My guess is that I need to use an HTTPS connection, and finding a free public HTTPS proxy isn't as easy as finding a free public HTTP proxy.

More on the flip.

There are also a number of other Wordpress hosts such as Blogsome, but after opening up an account to play around with, their implementation of Wordpress doesn't seem to be up to par (no option to import existing posts for example).

Given that, I'm probably going to wait until I get back to the States to set up Wordpress. For now, Blogger'll do.

In the meantime however, I've already started adding embedded tags into these posts. You can't see them because I have the CSS hiding them, but if you look at the HTML source, you'll notice things like "[tag]Blogging in China[/tag]" at the bottom of the posts. This is the Ultimate Tag Warrior format for embedded tags and it'll allow me to easily transfer to Wordpress later on. Also, to handle extended posts in Blogger, I enclose the extended bit with <div class="fullpost"> ... </div> tags. In Wordpress, the delineation is to simply place <!--more--> at the point you want to break your post into summary / full post sections. Given that adding it in the html doesn't affect Blogger, I've gone ahead and done that.

The nice thing about this is that it's fairly easy to use a search and replace to change all of these if I need them in a different format. As an added bonus, since I'm using Ecto to write up these posts on my PowerBook, I can easily export my posts to an RSS / Atom format to upload into Wordpress later on.

[tag]Wordpress[/tag] [tag]Blogger[/tag] [tag]Blogging[/tag] [tag]Blogging in China[/tag] [tag]Data Independence[/tag] [tag]Tags[/tag] [tag]Blog Updates[/tag] [tag]China[/tag]