Wordpress.com leaves much to be desired

It's mystifying that the service is so popular considering that it is ridiculously locked-down* and upsells you on things that Blogger gives for free. No user-specified JavaScript, even in sidebar widgets (which means no Sitemeter, no Disqus, etc.), no editing templates, and of course no plugins. To edit CSS, you need to pay them $14.97 a year. To add a custom domain, you need to pay them $12 per year if you have the domain registered somewhere else and $17. If you want no ads on your blog, you need to pay them a whopping $29.97 a year. All of which come standard in Blogger; the ability to edit CSS has been there since at least 2003 (or was it 2004) when I started my first blog and the lack of ads has been there since shortly after Google bought them. And they've always let you add ads, something that Wordpress.com won't do no matter what you pay them (assuming you don't have a special elite account not available to the public).

Best to either use Blogger or do what I did and get a cheap webhosting account and run real Wordpress with fully editable themes, the ability to install new themes yourself, the ability to add JavaScript anywhere, and the ability to add plugins galore. The ability to install new themes is particularly important considering that Wordpress themes in general either a) suck or b) are appropriate only in very specific purposes. Finding a good general Wordpress theme is like looking for a diamond in the rough. The 106 free themes they allow you simply doesn't cut it.

*Speaking of locked down, way back when it first started I began the process of migrating to Wordpress.com from Blogger. I found a 3-column theme I liked, I think it was one of the Andreas ones, but the way the items were displayed on the left sidebar didn't match the way they were displayed on the right sidebar. I discovered a hack using a text-box that allowed me to make them match. Within an hour or two (!) the theme was altered so that my hack didn't work. Because of the timing, I believed, and still believe, that they saw what I did and changed the theme just to break my simple display hack. I immediately gave up my migration plans. That is a level of control-freakery I won't put up with.

Update: That last paragraph was written from memory. I have since managed to dig up a contemporaneous post I wrote on my Blogger blog (which is long since gone, as is the account it was on: thank you Internet Archive!). The post is copied below the fold:

Friday, March 17, 2006

Whenever I think about leaving Blogger, I end up coming back again

Tonight I was giving serious thought to moving my blog to Wordpress.com. I found a template I liked tolerably well and was able to use their insertable text boxes* (that can contain HTML) to fix the one thing that really annoyed me about the theme (i.e., the items on the left sidebar were in boxes whereas the ones on the right sidebar were plain text). Within an hour or two of my hack the software was altered so that my hack made my blog load improperly. Then twenty minutes later it was altered again so that my hack simply didn't work (and I did thorough testing to make sure nothing I did caused either change — I even saw how they accomplished the second change, by having the system nest the text in the text widget within <div></div> tags). Of course it's possible that these changes had nothing to do with what I was doing, but the timing would suggest that I actually prompted them to change the way things work for everyone — twice. I actually feel kind of flattered.

I expect that they'd say that I was exploiting a dangerous loophole that others might use for malicious purposes (this is the kind of answer they customarily give to questions why they won't make themes more editable). Even if that's true, I am very disinclined to use a system so fragile that it can be seriously threatened by allowing someone to close and reopen an unordered list tag at the top of the sidebar to make the list style normal. I deleted my account. Alas, it's either Blogger or some paid option for me after all.

*Which was necessary since WordPress.com, unlike Blogger, does not allow direct access to their templates/themes.