Goodbye WordPress.com, Hello Freedom
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously,
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
- BALLAD IN PLAIN D
So, as you can see we’ve moved. About two weeks ago I decided to start this blog. A few hours and a few beers later, I was up and running on the hosted WordPress.com site. Picked the theme that I disliked least from the 17 or so available, and sprouted my first post. A couple of days later people that I didn’t even know started reading it, which was all very exciting.
It was about that time I realised that although WordPress.com is easy, it also sucks the big one if you want flexibility. The things that annoyed me in a week included:
- I have to pay to change the CSS. Probably a good things as my CSS is terrible and I’ll just make things worse, but I demand the right to change my CSS anyway.
- I have to pay to remove adverts. Fair enough I guess. In a moment of purity, I paid this for a year. Which was $30 down the toilet in retrospect.
- The built in analytics are horrible. I’m not actually sure what they mean. Of the 3,500 “Page Views” I’ve been told I’ve had since this has been live, I suspect 3,450 were from me, and the rest from me mum. Not even close to Google Analytics on the functionality front.
- The themes are inflexible. For example, I wanted to show only excerpts on my home page, not full stories. No-can-do with the theme I chose, I’m afraid. And the one line PHP change was beyond my control.
- I started to discover lots of cool plugins written by clever people, but I couldn’t touch them.
So yesterday we moved everything. I hope the migration has gone okay. I’ve chosen a theme I prefer. I’ve lost one comment, and it seems all the nesting of the existing comments. I’m going to see if I can h4x0r those back. I think all the existing deep links to the old jonontech.wordpress.com domain will actually still work. And the RSS feed is fixed with the auto-discovery feed matching the advertised feed. Thanks a million to James for helping me with this, seeing I couldn’t CSS or PHP my way out of a brown paper bag.
We had a few issues. My current hosting provider, it turns out, can’t support multiple host headers to my Linux VM, so that attempt failed. Then I tried my free GoDaddy hosting that came with my domain registration. Turns out that my account was incompatible with WordPress because “WordPress can only run on a paid hosting service”. Bastards! So I’ve coughed up my few dollars a month and, in the end, it was all remarkably easy. I also had to buy another WordPress.Com add-on so I could set up the deep link redirect to my new domain. Ching ching. That’s now $45 to WordPress. About a year’s hosting cost.
To be honest, I do think WordPress.com is pretty good. But, if you want flexibility and like WordPress, don’t be lazy like yours truly. Make the effort to host the thing yourself. Biggest blogging mistake I ever made.
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Hi Jon, looks great! Keep up the good work
Jules…
WordPress.com might be good to get up and running with a blog quickly, but, to be honest, if you’re techy you’ve got no excuse! You can whack up a WP on your own server, theme it, do some posts and you’re done in an hour or two, I can’t stop recommending it.
Oh I don’t believe it, the first two comments on this blog are by people who use the same themes on their personal WP blogs!
Ah, the freedom that comes with pretty mandatory upgrades every month or so… 2.8 is about to be released
Fortunately for you, though, upgrading WP should now be a one-click process… but whether it succeeds will depend on whether you’ve managed to correctly set the user rights to all the WP files 
Interesting to see that you have almost the same experience as me. I think WordPress.com is so limited that anyone with a little self-respect (or vanity?) has to either pay for the premium features, or move somewhere else.
Although I work for Escenic, I use WordPress for my personal blog, on my own server. In case you’re interested, I have listed some plug-ins I think are useful here: http://automagisk.no/blog/about/
I’m not sure what to say about Clay Shirky’s blog (http://www.shirky.com/weblog/), but it’s pretty clear that content IS king
I’ve been on self hosted wordpress for quite some time now but am quite fed up of the upgrade madness. Okay – so it is quite easy and all that but i still need to do it, check and test theme, upgrade and test all the plugins and so on. In fact, the last upgrade broke my theme!
But a hosted alternative is no good either, for reasons that you mentioned
I’ve also considered going back to blogger but gave up the idea. I considered it because the hosted version of blogger gives more flexibility (in terms of adding acripts etc to themes) and i get an option to do static publishing to my web server.
Followed your link from your comment on http://ferrogate.com/2009/04/the-new-ferrogate-i-moved-from-blogger-to-wordpress.html. Nice to hear my post was helpful – and I’m pleased to see you’ve made some smart choices above. Keep it up
Martin at FerroGate
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