Freedom from Blogger

Over the weekend, I completed my long-awaited move from Blogger to WordPress. There’s plenty of fine-tuning left to do – and I need to get rid of the hideous graphic in the header – but the transition went pretty smoothly.

I’ve been trying to get off of Blogger for about a year, but migration difficulties – in particular, the loss of link consistency – has frustrated me. With its release of version 2.6.2, WordPress has made migration almost one-button simple. Permalinks are still going back to the previous site template, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff for now to be free of the Blogger system.

I signed up for Blogger more than three years ago when I didn’t know any better. Since then, I’ve learned that blogging software can lock in a user almost as completely as any proprietary software. Because each publisher architects its service somewhat differently, migration has been a headache for years. WordPress is now resolving that problem to the point that moving to its platform no longer requires Herculean effort. I host four blogs on WordPress, with my main blog being the only exception.

Why had I grown frustrated with Blogger?

  • The selection of page templates is severely limited. I never found one I really liked. In contrast, there are thousands of free WordPress templates available. I’ve found many that I like.
  • I decided to host my blog on my own domain and use Blogger as an authoring system. This requires Blogger to FTP the files to my server, a process that had become frustratingly long and failure-prone as my site grew. Blogger offers an alternative to host your domain on its own servers for a fee, but since I was already paying a hosting service, this didn’t seem an attractive option.
  • Blogger has limited support for third-party widgets and plug-ins. WordPress has a vast library of them. This alone is enough reason to switch.
  • The Blogger content management system has far less flexibility than WordPress’, where you can customize almost anything.
  • I’ve found the results of Blogger’s “preview” function to have little to do with the resulting Web page. In contract, WordPress previews in the context of your chosen template.
  • WordPress has a function to automatically import Word documents. You still have to take out some code, but the process is pretty clean.

There are other reasons, but those are the big ones. For a basic one-button blog that’s drop-dead simple, Blogger is still a great option. But as you yearn to do more with your site, Blogger’s limitations become frustrating. Perhaps I will encounter some terrible problems in the next few days that force me to roll back, but for now, I’m enjoying the flexibility and open-source choice that WordPress provides.

Here’s a pretty good tutorial on how to make the switch.

Open Source Quality

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

The market for data quality software has gone open source, and it’s about time.

Late last month, Talend Open Data Solutions, a maker of data integration and profiling software, made its Talend Data Quality software available under the General Public License. This follows the French company’s move in June to open its Open Profiler product in a similar way. The tools can be used together to assess the quality of the information in customer databases and to correct basic name and address information against a master list maintained by the US Postal Service.

What’s more important, though, is the potential of open sourcing to bring down the costs of the complex and frustrating data cleansing process. As I noted a few weeks ago, data quality is one of the most vexing problems businesses face. Data that’s inconsistent, out of date or incorrectly formatted creates inefficiency, angry customers (have you ever gotten three direct mail pieces at the same time, each addressed a little differently?) and lost opportunity.

Solutions to data quality problems have existed for decades, but they’ve always been sold by small vendors, usually at prices starting in the six figures. Over the last few years, many of these vendors have been snapped up by bigger software firms, which then bundled data quality tools and services into giant software contracts. There aren’t a lot of vendors left that specialize in solving the quality problem specifically.

This fragmentation has frustrated a process that should be a part of every company’s IT governance practice. While each company has its own data quality issues, many are common to a large number of businesses. Talend’s approach doesn’t address the cost of accessing databases of “clean” data, but it has promise to make the cleansing process itself cheaper and more automated.

The secret is the magic of open source, which enables users to easily exchange their best work with each other. For just one example of how this works, check out SugarCRM’s SugarExchange. This collection of third party applications has been built by contributions from SugarCRM’s customers and independent developers. While some modules carry license fees, many don’t. The point is that software authors who useful extensions to the base CRM system have the wherewithal to share or sell them to others who have similar needs. That’s difficult or impossible to do with proprietary software.

This so-called “forge” approach to development lends itself particularly well to data quality because so many issues are common to multiple companies. For example, if I come up with a clever way to compare employee records to a database of known felons, I should be able to share it and even charge for it. That isn’t possible when the market is spread across an assortment of small, closely held companies. If Talend can extend its TalendForge library to incorporate a robust collection of data quality components, it can make data cleansing practical and affordable to a much larger universe of companies.

The data quality problem is so pervasive that it demands a collaborative approach to a solution. This is a good start.

Firefox Solidies Mind Share Lead

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Market share gains by the Firefox Web browser continued into early 2008, with Firefox now commanding 27% percent of all website visits. In total installed base, it still trails far behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but the open-source browser has already established itself as the mind share leader. That’s a remarkable feat in less than four years.

Firefox’s success is a tribute to the power of community development and the stickiness of open-source applications. It’s an example of how giving up control can enhance market leadership. Today, I would argue, Firefox is the dominant browser on the Internet.

How can that be when Firefox has only about a third of IE’s market share? Here’s a case where share is deceptive. For one thing, Firefox has momentum, having grown from less than 1% in 2004 to its present base of an estimated 140 million users. Secondly, Firefox has the allegiance of the most influential Internet users: enthusiasts, developers and people who contribute actively to social media sites. If there’s anything the history of the software industry has shown us, it’s that platforms that generate developer enthusiasm invariably edge out their competitors.

One can even argue that Firefox is already the top browser among these thought leaders. For example, look at the results of this poll from LifeHacker, a site devoted to computer and personal productivity advice. It’s unscientific, but still interesting.  Asked why they use Internet Explorer, only about 15%, said it was because they actually preferred the software.  Half of the respondents don’t even use IE at all.  So while Firefox may have relatively low market share among all computer owners, it has achieved parity among the audience of serious enthusiasts.

This is the beauty of an open architecture comes into play.  Firefox was designed and licensed from the beginning to accommodate user-develop extensions.  More than 2,000 of them listed on the Firefox add-ons site, ranging in weekly download activity from hundreds of thousands to less than a dozen.  Some of the extensions aren’t very good, but that doesn’t really matter.  Users make their own choices and sites like LifeHacker take care of publicizing the best work.

Microsoft also permits developers to write extensions to Internet Explorer, but its approaches is quite different.  In the early days, the IE software development kit was tightly controlled and add-ons had to pass Microsoft scrutiny in order to even be listed in the official directory.  Microsoft had made an earnest effort to loosen up this process, but the company is culturally resistant to this unfettered development. In contrast to Firefox’s 2,000 extensions Microsoft’s official directory of an IE add-ons lists less than 100 entries. Perhaps that’s because, as the company states on his homepage, “The add-ons available here have been carefully screened by Microsoft and rated by users to help you select the ones that suit your needs and preferences.” Perhaps users don’t want their choices screened.

Listen to this short podcast from last summer’s O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. In it, developers contrast the chaotic mess of the Firefox developer forums with the muted restraint of the IE third-party community. As StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp notes, new Firefox extensions and updates spark endless analysis and debate while IE developers rarely talk at all. Intensity makes markets dynamic and innovative, and that’s what Firefox has.

This market share war is meaningless from a revenue standpoint because browsers are free. But Firefox’ continuing success is a powerful case for the superiority of the open-source model.  Conceding power may paradoxically be the best way to gain power.