It's News to Me

Since this is an initial post, let me explain to you some of my reasons for jumping the Blogger ship. I have been blogging at Blogger for about 3 and a half years, and there my blog had the same name as it does here (although I may change it here if I can think of a better one). It was an experiment in publishing to the web for me. Blogger was for me, as it is for many, a first blogging experience, and I experienced a number of rewards because of it. I had become comfortable with it, and I had gained a few regular visitors, mostly friends and family of course, and an occasional stranger who sort of tripped over it by accident and let me know that he or she had visited.

In some ways, of course, being comfortable with Blogger led to not «going to the trouble» of locating a better option. As you might suspect, only an irritant, a burr under the saddle if you will, would prompt me to leave. And fate did me the courtesy of supplying just such an irritant by the name of Josh Bryant. This young man decided to bedevil me constantly by posting comment after comment that were maliciously aimed at another reader of my blog who happens to be retarded, the son of a friend of mine. I initially engaged him in an effort to explain about this retarded reader, but Mr. Bryant decided only to become more insensitive and belligerent. For a time I deleted each of his thoughtless comments, but in the end, he would only re-post the same obnoxious comment over and over again. Though I could turn off anonymous posting and did, that also limited other more considerate users' comments and restricted comments to other Blogger users.

I began to realize that what I really wanted was the ability to moderate comments. So as I searched for a blogging tool that would permit me to do that, I found WordPress. When I also discovered Flock and found that I could create a website here at WordPress.com for free, that gave me the impetus to make the switch. We'll see how it goes here, but for the moment I am pleased.