Butterfly Wings

It started with CaringBridge. My child was terribly sick, and I was overwhelmed, and somebody recommended an easier way than email and phonecalls. It put all the updates in one place, and people new to the journey could go back and catch up without me having to repeat everything over and over again.

But sometimes I wanted to talk about myself, how I was feeling, what the journey was doing to me. I felt that I couldn’t do that in “his” journal. I felt that I had to keep my own stuff separate, or hidden. People didn’t read his page to hear my thoughts. They just wanted to know how my boy was doing.

So, when things were a bit less crazy, and I had a bit more time, I looked at blogging. I had long thought about creating a website or a blog, but had never done anything about it. I finally decided on b2evolution. It appealed to me, for its ability to host multiple blogs on the same installation (so I could have one for The Boy, one for me, room to add more later); for its geekiness (learning how to code — or at least modify code — and playing with themes etc); for its open source community; for its not being a mainstream blogging platform.

It really didn’t matter if it wasn’t perfect. I have very few no regular readers anyway, and I’m not sure if I want to have a big following. However, lately some things have made me want a change. Some features I really like have not upgraded with the main upgrades, and I’m not knowledgeable enough to write my own plugins. Upgrades are tedious, especially since I modified and customised so much in the beginning — yes, I was warned about that, but I figured I would cross that bridge when I got to it. And I’m sure upgrades are just as tedious on any other self-hosted platform.

Plus, I kind of just want to try something different now.

I’m thinking about trying WordPress. What scares me most is migrating from b2evo to WP. I’m wondering if it’s even worth it. While there are features I want, and things I could tidy up, I quite like my page theme and wouldn’t want to change it too radically. Still, I look at so many other blogs and think “wow, mine looks so amateurish” — especially with all of those smileys (admittedly an easy fix).

I’m also wondering if I should go for a complete name change. I’m really attached to my cockatoos, but there are specific reasons that I chose “Butterfly Wings”, and I quite like having my blog as a separate, not necessarily always mum-oriented, entity.

So, does anybody out there have any opinions on blogging platforms? What do you use? What do you love about yours? What do you not love so much? If you don’t love it, why haven’t you changed? Is it because it’s easier to stick with what you have, or because even with its limitations, it’s still better than the alternatives?

Has anybody else used b2evo?