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.

And therein lies the big difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.  If you go to WordPress.org, you can freely download the open source WordPress blogging software that can be installed on a your own computer (local install) or on a hosted/remote server.  (And actually, most good web hosting services will install WordPress automatically, so there is no need to download the software from wordpress.org).  Editing your blog using WordPress software installed on your own web site gives you MUCH more control over the design of your blog.  Here are the steps I went through to get my own domain and server space:

1. First, I went to WordPress.org and found the online installation manual for hosting my own installation of WordPress.
2. Following its advice, I next chose a web hosting site to buy my own domain and remote server space.  There are a gajillion web hosting places out there, but because of my inexperience in this area, I looked for one that was recommended by WordPress, cheap, and could install WordPress onto my purchased server space itself.  It turns out that most quality hosting services cost between $5 and $7 a month, and most will install WordPress for you.  So I chose justhost.com, and I ended up paying $71 for a year of web hosting with all the features and space I’ll need for my little blog.
3. After following the instructions from JustHost and getting my domain squared away and ready, I clicked on the “install WordPress” button in my domain’s control panel (cPanel), and went through the three steps to get WordPress installed.

After this, I went to my brand new blank blog and started the process of moving my old blog into its new space.

1. First, in my old wordpress.com blog dashboard, I selected “export” under the Tools tab on the left of the page.  This allowed me to export posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags and put them into a WordPress export file to be saved on my computer.
2. Next, in my new WordPress blog dashboard (which is very similar to the old wordpress.com dashboard), I selected “Import” under the Tools tab on the left of the page.  This takes you to a page that gives you many (there are 15) options for importing data into your WordPress blog.  Clicking on the “WordPress” option let me import all the data in my saved export file from my old WordPress blog into my new blog.
3. After this, I just had to import the links I had saved in the “Links” tab in my old wordpress.com blog dashboard.  To do this, I clicked the “blogroll” option in the “Import” section of my new blog, which prompted me to either upload a file I could have saved on my computer containing my old links data, or to specify an OPML url.  I did the latter, and typed in http://www.[the name of my old blog].wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php.  Bingo – all the data from my old blog was now in my new one.

Next, I went about rebuilding my blog.  First I had to find a new theme.

1. While I was pretty happy with my old theme, there are a lot more themes to choose from in the wordpress.org community, so my eye wandered a bit.  After finding one I wanted, I installed it, activated it, and then I was free to tweek the colors, text attributes, and pretty much anything else using the theme editor found under the “Appearance” tab in the dashboard.
   • Incidentally, I figured out that I could actually install the theme I was using for the old blog even though I couldn’t find it using the native theme search function in the WordPress dashboard.  After finding it on the web, I was able to freely download it and then manually upload it into the wordpress software stored on the remote server that holds all my blog data.  To do this, I needed to download the robust (and free) File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client Cyberduck.  PC users, check out FileZilla.  Even though you could probably live in your WordPress world without ever using an FTP client, its a good idea to figure out how to use one – it’s really easy.  These are what allow you to upload and/or manage files that are housed on your website.  Following the installation directions on the site where I downloaded the theme, I unzipped the file that enclosed the theme data and placed it into the wp-content/themes directory using my FTP client.  This directory was located here: root directory > public_html > wp-content > themes.
   • Another occasion I had to use this happened when I first tried to install WordPress from the hosting site.  It initially wouldn’t let me install it at www.thingsfromtom.com because there was already data in the root directory of my website.  It instead wanted me to install it in another directory, which would have given my blog a url of “www.thingsfromtom.com/techblog” or something.  So I opened up Cyberduck, connected to my website, and deleted the contents in the public_html folder.  (This was just the webpage that justhost.com created as a default location for when people land on www.thingsfromtom.com before I designed any content.)
2. With the theme all set up, all I had left to do was fiddle around with the widgets and plugins in my blog.  (Plugins can be modified from the “Plugins” tab on the left of the WordPress dashboard, and widgets are located under the “Appearance” tab.  There is NO Plugins tab in the wordpress.com dashboard.)  This process is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t get into how these are installed and edited here.  But I will say that plugins are what make putting your blog on your own website and editing the design using the WordPress software totally worth it.

Wow.  That was long.  But I hope it helps anyone who is considering breaking from wordpress.com and taking more control of their blog.  It really isn’t that hard, you get a lot more flexibility in your blog’s design, and you end up with your own domain to which you can design and add other web pages.  Having a website these days is a terrific marketing tool and a great way to learn a skill that can’t hurt anyone in today’s gawd-awful job market.

Related posts:

1. Why I chose WordPress.com