I was reading If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide and I realized I agree with everything Maddox has to say. Especially all the words that have evolved out of blog. I don’t know why that word rubs me the wrong way. But it does.

The word “blog” is literally shorthand for “boring;” a vulgar, overused word that strikes your ear with the dull thud of a cudgel to the soft spot of a child. It’s an abbreviation used by journalism drop outs to give legitimacy to their shallow opinions and amateur photography that seems to be permanently stuck in first draft hell. Looking in the archives of the blogs, one would expect someone who has been at it for years to slowly hone their craft and improve their writing and photographs, since it’s usually safe to assume that if someone does something long enough, he or she will eventually not suck at it. Even with lowered expectations, you’ll get a shotgun blast of disappointment in your face.

I hate when someone refers to my site as a blog. I don’t know what you would label my site as. But it sure as hell is not a blog. It’s just my website. As far as improving with time, I guess I can only hope so. The next quote makes me chuckle every time I think how hard it was to get my site design to work with WordPress:

It’s an unspoken rule that every blog must use the same layout as every other blog: long, slender columns of annoyingly condensed text, thousands of links to other blogs, plugs for shitty political books, and more links to yet more blogs

It’s all of course a matter of taste. But I like my fucked up style that I use. Lot’s of html and tables with just a very small bit of css. I would love to learn all this css shit and I’m sure I will as I play with it. That same overused look of most of these “blogs” is one of the reasons I stuck with Coranto as long as I did. That’s one of Coranto’s big pluses is how easy it is to modify once you figured out the ins and outs of it’s operation. Another advantage of Coranto is a smaller and friendlier community. WordPress has what I would call unfriendly approach to new users.

Which leads me to ask myself why I use WordPress instead of Coranto? I guess a lot of it has to do with just how much easier it is to use right out of the box. The install is like two clicks. You really can’t beat it’s ease of use. It’s getting to look a certain way that is hard. But even that isn’t so bad once you understand the basics of templates and the loop.

Everything I have learned was by myself though. Unlike the huge amounts of help I got over at the Coranto Forums. I’ve given up on the so called support forums WordPress has. You got to help yourself if you want to do anything with WordPress. In the end it’s worth it though. The ease of use I mention is the biggest factor in my decision to switch. But I can’t adopt this blog-blogger-blogoshpere attitude the majority of them have.