In the first major change to this blog since… a long time ago, I have moved the hosting of Cut the Chatter from Blogger to WordPress. The URL hasn’t changed, nor has the RSS feed, or anything else in terms of reading the blog so you, dear reader, shouldn’t really notice a huge difference. The blog itself will look different, particularly if I get off my butt and actually try to make it look nice, but that should be it. But because it’s on WordPress, I may have the ability to do cool things that I couldn’t do before. Not that I have any ideas what those might be, but there are a million WordPress plug-ins out there so I’ll have to peruse what’s available and maybe play around with them.

The initial reason I made this switch was basically because Twitter changed their API a year or two ago. Because of that change, the Twitter plug-in for Windows Live Writer (which I use to write all my articles) no longer worked, so when I published an article, I had to manually tweet the link, and then I’d manually post the link to Facebook. I got tired of that, so I looked for services to do it for me. Surely this is simple – check an RSS feed once every hour and when a new article shows up, tweet / post the title of the article along with a link to it. How hard can that be?

Well, I tried about four of them. In every case, it sometimes worked fine while other times the auto-tweets / postings would take many hours or even days to show up, if they showed up at all. After losing patience with the fourth one, I asked for help on Facebook and Twitter. Marisa said that if I used WordPress I got that ability for free, and a bunch of other things as well. I was hesitant about WordPress because when I looked into switching a few years ago, I discovered I had to pay to use cutthechatter.com (instead of cutthechatter.wordpress.com), while Blogger let me change my domain name for free. I’m not going to pay for something I can get for free, am I? Well, when enough people tell you “yes, it’s worth it”, then you start to think about it. From what I’ve seen so far, $26 per year (for both this blog and my lacrosse blog) is indeed worth it.

Let me know what you think! Not only will it give me some welcome feedback but it will allow me to test out WordPress comments!

Update: Unfortunately, the twitter thing didn’t work. No tweet, no Facebook post, no Google+ post when this article was published. I think it’s because I use Windows Live Writer rather than publishing from the web site. It’d be awfully ironic if the very reason I switched was to get a feature that I can’t use anyway.
Update 2: The Twitter/Facebook/Google+ thing works fine, as long as you publish the article from the web site. If I publish it from Windows Live Writer, I get nothing. So now I post the article to the blog as a draft, then go go the web site and publish it from there. I can also choose to publish it at a future date/time as well.