Summary: I've moved to http://brianleung.weebly.com/
Since Posterous is shutting down, and after seeing a friend use Weebly, I decided to give it a go. I have used Wordpress in the past and think it's pretty neat - I think it's probably most powerful when you host it yourself, which gives you full flexibility over the customisation options compared to a free blog hosted at Wordpress.com. I hadn't really heard about Weebly until recently, so this is a bit of an experiment.
What I like about Weebly:
- I like WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Wordpress uses a "what you see is what you mean" kind of editor, which means you can see headings and other formatted elements clearly, but these end up being in the editor screen's theme and not your site's theme, so you have to go and preview the post to see what it actually looks like on the web page. The Weebly approach is to just let you edit stuff straight onto the page itself, so it's slightly more intuitive.
- The image inserter gives you all the options you want, including uploading from your computer, selecting from already-uploaded images, searching for royalty-free images, and using an image url. I'm impressed with the thought they put into this.
- It's easy to make a website in the way you choose. Since Weebly is firstly a website creator, rather than a blog creator, it's a bit easier to make static pages. It's also easy to incorporate multiple blogs into the one site, as I've decided to do - I've decided to shift my work as a ministry apprentice into a separate blog of its own.
- It's easy to customise. There are many good themes to choose from. When you insert an image, you can edit it to resize it or add text to it. You can change all the fonts if you like, and there's a load of good fonts to choose from (you don't even have to have them installed on your computer!). As an aside, the font chooser groups the fonts by category (sans-serif, serif, decorative, etc), which is heaps more useful than the traditional alphabetical list! What's more, even the free plan for Weebly lets you write your own HTML and CSS, so you can really do whatever you like with the site design.
What I wish Weebly had:
- The one thing I wish Weebly had was a "scheduled post" feature. Posterous has this, and I have been using it quite a bit because it means I can write the posts at any time and have them appear by themselves at a regular time each week.
- Weebly also doesn't seem to have a way to import my blog posts from Posterous or any other place, so it will probably take a while to move my posts over. I do have a backup saved on my computer, so all is not lost after Posterous shuts down.
Overall, I like the experience so far. I got started very quickly by using my facebook account to sign up, and finding my way around hasn't been hard. I'd recommend it for someone who wants a free website or blog and just wants things to be easy peasy.
So, if you want to keep up with what I'm thinking and writing, please go over to http://brianleung.weebly.com/ and subscribe/bookmark/do whatever you were doing before.