[SPvsWP]
Backstory
For the first time in my 5-6 years of blogging, I’m not using WordPress. I’ve been a WordPress fan since ver. 1.2 and I never used any other platform. The year 2012 is the year, where I try something else. Now I’m consolidation my 3 running blogs (in danish) to one blog (in english). and I’m trying to do do end up on a SharePoint platform. SharePoint is known for a great many things, but I don’t think tat blogging has ever been one of them. Truthfully, I’m hoping for the best but expecting the worst.
I’m a SharePoint Specialist and have lots of love for the platform. I can bend it most ways I wish. But when it comes to blogging, Microsoft haven’t really paid attention the last few years. When it comes to blogging, SharePoint is very simple. but when it comes to publishing SharePoint can be very complex.
Technical setup
For this experiment I’m using the free SharePoint Foundation 2010 with a standard Blogging template. I run the SharePoint and backend MSSQL on an HP-Micro server, with 8Gb RAM.
Design
If you want’s to ajust the design of the blog, there’s no theme to download (nothing of any value anyway) so you start from scratch. That means SharePoint Designer, Masterpages and CSS. I’ve made some ajustments to the design and imported some posts, which needs translating. I use all the standard markups, but they allso needs an overhaul.
Blogging Clients
I’ve tested Windows Live Writer, Microsoft Word 2010 and MarsEdit
MarsEdit
– Don’t seem to work with SharePoint at all
MS Word 2010
– Look okay, but puts enclosed images in the “photos” library and you cannot edit the HTML
Windows Live Writer
– Very good editor. Puts the images as attached files to the post. Easy to edit the HTML. The problem with the Live Writer is, that it dosen’t exist for mac-users.
Conclusion
I’m not done yet using SharePoint as my blogging platform. Fact is though, I need to put up my own hardware to run this site, which is not very “green-ish”. I pride myself of beeing very pro-cloud computing. I work as an Cloud Specialist and therefore is hosting your own local server a little contradicting to my jobtitle. Never the less, this is just a test. The future of Getinthesky.com is either here on SharePoint Foundation or at WordPress.com. Local or Cloud. 1 TB or 3 Gb.. 100+ themes or “build your own”. No Spam-protection or Akismet. SharePoint editor or WordPress editor. etc.etc.
I’ll keep you posted
For the first time in my 5-6 years of blogging, I’m not using WordPress. I’ve been a WordPress fan since ver. 1.2 and I never used any other platform. The year 2012 is the year, where I try something else. Now I’m consolidation my 3 running blogs (in danish) to one blog (in english). and I’m trying to do do end up on a SharePoint platform. SharePoint is known for a great many things, but I don’t think tat blogging has ever been one of them. Truthfully, I’m hoping for the best but expecting the worst.
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