Why We Went Wordpress

Well, it's day two here at the newly redesigned Dean Files, and following on the heels of this new iteration, you might be asking, "Why would Jen and Jason change their site again, and make me update my reader and stuff?" As a matter of fact, fellow librarian and blogger Erin Dorney asked the same thing. Allow me to answer that question with a bit of background.



Though you can't tell from this most recent iteration of The Dean Files, the blog has been around for over a year. I think we started it before I began my studies at Syracuse. Neither Jen nor I were super familiar with hosting blogs and websites, and so we went the easiest route possible - with iWeb. Don't misunderstand me here, iWeb is great, and it was perfect for us at the time. However, as time went on and we became more adept at internet related tasks and we viewed more (and more awesome) blogs, we started seeing things that we wanted to do with our blog. I would come home and see if we could implement it in iWeb, which invariably we couldn't. We wanted to be able to post from locations other than our home computer, which is not allowed from iWeb (I really wanted to live blog a bit from ALA). We wanted our links and images to display correctly, and I really wanted to use track- and pingbacks. You guessed it - not allowed in iWeb. For me, though, what pushed me over the edge was the knowledge that many libraries use WordPress, and it would be nice to have some hands-on experience with it.



Furthermore, several of my favorite blogs and websites use WordPress. As I have recently discovered, you can also set up a taxonomy (called "categories"). Totally appeals to the controlled vocabulary part of me.

Well, without droning on and on about the redesign, I think that's a nice start. Questions about what we did? Comments about how we did it? Suggestions for improvement? Weather report from your neck of the woods? Let me hear from you in the comments!