WordPress.com is nice because you don’t have to mess around with a server or, necessarily, with getting your own domain.

WordPress software is nice because you can do anything you want. Cue maniacal cackling off into the distance.

But more concrete comparisons:

Access:
The first thing you did was take out that little Meta toolbar on the side, right? It looks unprofessional and sloppy, though some people dislike it more than others (I hate it).

.com: go to your site/wp-admin or wordpress.com or someone’s site where they left up the Meta toolbar. It doesn’t matter which, since you can navigate the whole back end of WordPress after the one login.
Software: go to your site/wp/wp-admin. That’s pretty much the only option.

Appearance:
Themes govern most of how your blog appears. Themes are a collection of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that tell things to align left or align right or show up purple.

.com: There are a variety of free themes, and even more paid ones, and you can almost definitely find one you love. Typically from there you can also select background color or image and header image. If you buy an upgrade, you can also edit the CSS. You don’t get access to the CSS files themselves, though, so you are overwriting blind. If you are pretty confident, that’s fine, whatever. If you are mostly used to editing and not building and have never bothered to look at the source code for various pages, when WordPress updates and breaks your theme you will spend several hours drinking and frantically trying to correct the website, while text boxes float around seemingly arbitrarily and look completely different on the three screens you eventually end up looking through because you are trying to fix the header and you’ve changed the alignment and indent and mandatory margin but you don’t actually have access to the files and it doesn’t occur to you to override the vertical alignment, and you then switch to a different theme that is not actually broken but does truly horrifying things to your submenus. When you eventually wake up, vodka having beaten panic at about three-thirty in the morning, WordPress will have fixed it and you will spend the rest of the day in nihilistic despair.
Software: There are myriad themes and you can not only customize the background and header but also look at the CSS and pinpoint that this line of code here governs what color links default to and change just that to make everything violently orange. You will accidentally leave an extra space or digit or apostrophe somewhere and crash the server. Things will need to be reinstalled. You can take comfort in your own agency in the failure.

Seriously, though, themes and editing without messing with the CSS can get you a pretty customized website, and WordPress is great about fixing their mistakes and errors that crash the server can be corrected.

Widgets:
If you’re building a WordPress site, you freaking love widgets. Widgets are awesome. The Text widget (which lets you insert arbitrary text and HTML) is how you get your Twitter feed or follow button up, and your tumblr follow button, and a lot of the other buttons social networking sites let you generate. But widgets let you do a heck of a lot more than that: they’re your Facebook like box and your RSS feed and your contact info and your flickr link and your category cloud. Widgets are how you implement neat features without extensive background in coding.

.com: limited number, but they cover a lot, and the text widget with HTML adds additional functionality.
Software: widgets for the software are actually a feature of the plugins you can get. Plugins for the software are great, because you can get ones that tweet automatically every time you get a new post, or generate a new post every time you tweet, or do all manner of strange and unlikely things. The trick is that they are reviewed but not actively policed, so you need to make sure it actually does what it says it does, and isn’t broken.

Akismet:
Akismet is a spam filter, and is how you filter all the comments that are lists of links to scams or are soliciting people to buy knock-off Gucci handbags on your bike site. You want a spam filter. Akismet’s pretty good.
.com: it’s already there.
Software: you need to install the plugin. It is a terrible amount of work. You have to click, like, three things.

Scalability:
What do you do when you suddenly get lots of traffic on your website?
.com: It absorbs the traffic, and doesn’t cost you extra money.
Software: Your server might crash, or you might need more servers. This can cost more, and may or may not be able to respond quickly to a sudden surge.

Which you choose will depend on your comfort with code, your ability to acquire and comfort with self-hosting, and how much you like customizability. They’re both excellent platforms, versatile enough for almost everyone.

Basically, they’re following up on permissions they got in the Patriot Act, when we were all still going ‘please take my liberty and give me security and screw Ben Franklin.‘

This is a great post that talks about what such measures can lead to.

Which leads to my perennial post about anonymity. I have not posted about it nearly as much as I thought I had, given that I am persistently cranky about it. Anonymity is very hard to do, and true anonymity is something that has to be worked on persistently and in the face of people who would really prefer that you didn’t. Things like The Onion Router and other things discussed in Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother are good starts, and Cryptocat is a valuable tool, and encryption keys are completely fantastic.

But all of these things take effort, and are very different from posting ‘down with the government’ or whatever on your Facebook page. If you’re going to go through the effort of anonymity, if you care about a cause enough to get active in protesting, posting on your Facebook or whatever about it is actually potentially dangerous to you and everyone who liked it out of abiding bitterness over parking tickets.

So if you care about something deeply? Talking casually about it on the internet is probably one of the last things you want to do. In light of the surveillance abilities of even reasonably democratic governments, making sure everything you say online would meet with the approval of a hyper-judemental theoretical grandmother is a safe bet.

Also, for writers, anonymity is almost always the enemy of publicity.

I usually use WordPress, because it’s simple, straightforward, and, while you can get more mileage from it if you know how to override the CSS and edit the HTML manually, you can get a perfectly functional, useful website without any of that knowledge. You can even get a decent website out of WordPress if you don’t feel comfortable poking around with all the settings. Having that low barrier of entry for use is really great, especially for people who want a website but not to live on the internet as they swear at code at 3 in the morning.

I’ve also worked in Joomla!, which was fine, but required more poking around before I could reliably make it do what I wanted it to. I don’t usually recommend it for people, since it did require that experimentation.

The first site I set up for my mom was with Yola, which has convenient drag-and-drop boxes for doing stuff. The second, when she wanted to blog more, was WordPress, because of the simpler comments features.

This, obviously, is Blogger, and I like it for the stripped down simplicity. I don’t need it to do anything fancy or have particular page features, because it’s a blog and it blogs and that is all I require of it. I like the clean back end with clear labeling and the option to compose both pages and posts either in rich text or HTML. If someone doesn’t want to do fancy things with the appearance of their site and prioritizes the blogging over the static pages, Blogger is a great option.

Today I got to mess around in Wix, which I hadn’t before. I don’t like that it automatically adds big banners advertising themselves to the bottom of every site. I don’t like that on so much of the back end, clicking a link opens a new tab or window. I don’t like that the font modification options aren’t universal: you have to change them page by page. I don’t like that everything is popups. The ability to create an online store is pretty neat. The fact that all elements need to be moved around by hand instead of, oh, going into a neat sidebar, is fucking maddening. It also treats subpages as forms, making links to particular subpages look sloppy. Also, when you view page source (to see wtf is up with the fonts), it treats every subpage as part of the same page, so you are looking at every single element. I’m used to looking at the source for WordPress, which is full of stuff that governs margins or whatever: endless lines of repetitive whatever, but that doesn’t look anywhere near as sloppy. Wix also gives the options to add SEO keywords to pages, which, I guess, could make sense with image-heavy galleries, but is also reflective of a five-years-out-of-date approach to SEO.

Here’s the secret to SEO: write about the shit you want to write about. People who are interested in that shit will find your website. If you are an artist who takes commissions, having a blog post that talks about different art styles will bring in people who search for those art styles. They will find you and give you money.  Would keyword stuffing with sex and kittens and whatever be of benefit to you?

It might get you more hits, but is that of benefit to you? You want people to buy art from you. Unless you specialize in like cat pinups or something, you are not attracting people who are interested in what you’re doing, you’re just getting people who will click things.

Blogger’s statistics section shows search keywords that have lead to my blog. Let’s look at some of the top ones of all time:

So, the first one is people forgetting that this is a .ca blog, and the third, fifth, and sixth are because of interviews I did with people more popular than me. Those all make sense as people who would appreciate the content here.

I’ve only talked about kishotenketsu once, but people continue to be interested in it, which is great. It’s something I was really interested in, so people also interested in it might be interested in other things I talk about here.

Fourth is my name. Excellent. SEO is doing its job.

Amazing spreadsheets is probably because of my ‘spreadsheets are amazing’ tag.

And the question ‘is the kobo vox backlit’ probably leads directly to my review of the Kobo Vox, which includes the information that it’s backlit and other details about it.

Search engines are designed to take people to what they’re looking for. So use common terminology (if you’re talking about books, don’t call them bound stories or something like that) and correct spelling and provide regular new content, and that is your SEO.

If you’re not getting as many hits as you’d like, make sure your website is attached to your profile on every site you’re on and post more.

Back to Wix: you can’t even configure a Facebook like box to go to a page you’ve already created. It does some auto-suggestion bullshit.

In conclusion: Wix sucks and I hate it. Only real benefit is the webstore, but that’s what eBay and Etsy are for. 2/10, would set fire to again.

And, despite whatever steps one took to be less traceable: never using your real name, never posting your city, etc. there’s always, always a temptation to have a linked identity. So if you use a username on Livejournal it might be tempting to use it on Deviantart and then, well, it’s practically a brand, so you might use it on Etsy, too. And then you do commissions or pay someone to do a commission for you and you use your paypal, which, a lot of the time, is going to have your name attached to it, because your money needs to at some point pass through something with your name attached.

So you yourself would have attached your real name in a long roundabout way to the things you posted on Livejournal lo, these many years ago.

And that’s not even bringing up Facebook. This afternoon, a friend told me she’d been being harassed by someone she met in a chat room. The harassment was happening on Facebook, but he’d blocked her after she told him she didn’t appreciate the threats, so she didn’t have access to his page anymore, which she kind of wanted to gather information to go to the police.

Google to the rescue! I have this guy’s name and the country he lives in. I was able to, in very short order, provide a decent picture (decent as in it fits most of the guidelines for ID photos), all of the biographical information he has online (including names and pictures of his parents and sibling), and links to his Facebook profile, Formspring, and Twitter accounts. The usernames on the Formspring and Twitter were not similar to his name, but he’d input his full name into the information anyway, so this was all in the first page of Google results.

Things he did on the internet, in cyberspace (which some people, including friends of mine, sometimes consider as less real than things which happen face to face), are going to result in criminal charges for this young man.

I can almost guarantee he didn’t expect this: if you block someone on Facebook, they’re supposed to be gone forever! But they’re not. Things which happen online are quite, quite real, and a number of us have some or all of our professional lives on the internet.

Anonymity or even approximations thereof can be detrimental to building a brand if one is trying to be a professional online. Anonymity can seem like a great bastion if one is trolling on the internet, and even the format itself can be seen as a buffer.

But anonymity is a very, very hard to attain and maintain. That’s why the creator of Cryptocat is being persecuted so very hard. Anonymity is vital for political agitation and protest under an oppressive regime, but there’s a natural tendency to want to slip up and have people you are speaking to acknowledge you as a person. When it’s trolls who are enabling me to hunt down all their information to neatly package for the cops, this is great. When it’s protesters who end up beaten and jailed for trying to change the world for the better, it is quite a bit less than great.

But the fact of the matter is that, unless one is taking extraordinary measures, you are not anonymous.