I’ve been playing around with WordPress.com over the past few days and figured I’d share what I like and what I don’t. I’m still on the fence about moving my real blog (which uses Blogger to publish to my own server) over to this.

The good:

• WordPress is a real blogging system - Blogger just publishes static pages either on blogspot or you’re server. It’s comparable to Typepad (which charges for it’s service) in that it has trackbacks and more sophisticated comments than blogger.
• Because the server isn’t generating static pages and uploading them making posts is a lot quicker without the “did that post” problems of blogger.
• The Rich text control for editing posts seems to work quite a bit better (at least in Firefox on the Mac). Editing the HTML is not quite as good as Blogger and I tend to hand modify HTML a lot - mostly for doing
• It allows you to write posts or author pages which are not part of the page. This is useful if you want to write a longer, generally useful article rather than a blog post which is tied chronologically to when it was written.
• Categories!
• You can make a post password protected. I doubt I’d personally ever really use this but it’s nice to have.

The less good:

• Not really sure what the business model is and how much (if anything) WordPress.com will charge - I definitely wouldn’t move until that is established.
• So far only one invite (which I gave to Jeff Nolan) - other people have asked my about blogging recently who might like this more than blogger.
• The Templates don’t appear to be editable - there are just a fixed number of themes to pick. This might be because the service is in beta only right now. I’d like to add Flickr badges, del.icio.us links like I have on my Blogger blog. I’m hoping that I will eventually be able to edit the template for the HTML version and the RSS feed for the blog - Movable Type supports this and probably the WordPress engine does too. It’s just not exposed in the hosted version.
• I can’t seem to change the name or subtitle of the blog. Turns out you can, the “Options” tab in the Dashboard has a bunch of sub-tabs that have quite a few more options including changing the title.
• I’ll add more stuff as it comes up

UPDATE: I got a response on some of my issues inside of an hour. On a sunday - which I appreciate because I’m at work on a Sunday.

This is a blog to try out WordPress.com - my real blog is here. I’m still mulling over whether to switch over to WordPress. Currently I cannot edit templates here. If they fix that and I can I edit my RSS template as well, I probably will switch since WordPress seems far superior to blogger.