September 19'th 2004 marked the day that I officially started blogging again. For years prior to that I had a PHPNuke and then a Postnuke site that I hosted with my personal computer. I don't really count these because I didn't really use them. They basically satisfied my curiosity in content management (CM) systems.
So I've used LJ for a year and it has been a relatively positive experience. I like LJ's community model and its open development spirit. Many of my friends use LJ and its a great way to keep in touch and share our thoughts. That being said LJ has some serious short comings. It doesn't have easy online searching of your posts. It lacks aesthetics. There are no beautiful styles/themes to choose from. There's a lack of good WYSIYG clients for the Mac or web browser. In fact the only one I'm aware of is Deepest Sender and at least for the, Mac, it wasn't stable.
Enter WordPress. Breaking the idea that I wanted to get away from maintaining my own blog serving software, I installed WordPress. It has everything that LJ does not have - searching, WYSIWIG editor plugins, beatuiful themes.
After years of usage, I know what I want and need in terms of "sharing" on the internet. Photo's. My family takes lots of pictures and we like to share them. If I look at my usage over the past 5 years, I primarily post pictures and sometimes attach a story to the picture. I've used Gallery to manage my photo's online for years. WordPress has a number of plugins that will allow it to integrate with Gallery. This should make it easier for me to attach those stories to my pictures.
Who doesn't like to have their cake and eat it too? With the WordPress plugin, LivePress, I should also be able to cross post to LJ! So far this seems to work. If you are reading this on my LJ then it, indeed has. Well, I guess time will tell if this is *the* solution or yet another tangent. :)