You know, if someone had told me there was a blog tool that genuinely felt like a low duty-cycle word processor, I probably would have laughed at them.

Also, I would have been wrong. Word Press turns out to be exactly what I wanted.

Word Press is a somewhat difficult beast to describe. For all its widgets, it’s actually pretty stripped down, which I like. Very little cruft to get in the way of things. It’s built on standards compliant XHTML, has clean CSS skins, and generally doesn’t try to get in your way. Panels are all foldy, and you can drag your edit window to resize to your screen – particularly nice given that my laptop has a funny aspect screen.

I learned the importance of drafts the hard way, something I kvetched about in an earlier entry; in Word Press, drafts are listed at the top of every write post screen. It’s in fact quite a nice layout, and is relatively low-hassle. Importing the posts from my previous hackadelic blog extension for MediaWiki was also relatively painless, as was setting up the various panels on the right column.

All in all I’m impressed, and I’m not impressed by many products like this. Way to go, Word Press.