Posts Tagged ‘ wordpress.com ’

My excellent adventure from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

When I began this blog, my main intent was to write.  As such, I was concerned with finding a free way to get my blog up and running (detailed in a previous post).  WordPress.com was my answer, and it offers a great way create a blog quickly and easily.  Despite this, small issues quickly came up that bugged me enough to switch to using wordpress.org software hosted on a remote server with my own domain and gain more control over my blog.

First, I realized WordPress.com did not let me change any aspect of the blog template I chose at the site without paying $15 a year to be able to customize the CSS in the template.  Second, I started to notice and desire things to add to my blog – like the addtoany.com button you can see at the bottom of this post.  WordPress.com blogs offer relatively few options for adding small customizations like this to blog postings.  Eventually I figured out that there is a way to do this, but it is definitely a workaround and not too convenient.  There are many beautifully designed blogs which say they are made with WordPress, but I knew I couldn’t recreate these blogs with my WordPress.com account.

There's more - keep reading... (1250 words, estimated 5:00 mins reading time)
2009
08/20
CATEGORY
Blogging
Professional Development
TAGS


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Why I chose WordPress.com

Honestly, I didn’t put a lot of thought into which hosted blogging service to choose.  I just knew it had to be two things: free (I know what that means) and good (not exactly sure what that means).  In the quick research I did, I found:

Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal.com, a dumb ‘ol AOL service, and a dumb ‘ol Microsoft service.  The rest I’d never really heard of, and I figured one of these would do the trick.

I’ve played around with Blogger in the past when I helped design the Fox Net Impact Blog for school.  It worked well, but I always felt like it was going to freeze or stop working when I was editing the layout of my page.  It was especially frustrating when trying to add “Gadgets” – the little boxes of information to the right and/or left of the main blog content that holds links, external calendars, etc.  The blog was eventually finished and it turned out fine, but it wasn’t quite as effortless as the service was trying to be.

There's more - keep reading... (313 words, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
2009
08/12
CATEGORY
Blogging
Professional Development
TAGS

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What’s My Point?

This blog is about my frantic sprint to a life where everything I do, write, read, watch, and (perhaps) say will be translated into 1’s and 0’s, stored on an unfathomable number of computers around the world, and be instantly accessible from my MacBook. All the stuff I discuss in here is really cool, (usually) really cheap, and make me more productive.