If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you heard about my recent decision to move off my dedicated server and onto a WordPress blog. It’s been an interesting exercise shifting off your own space and onto a cookie-cutter service, which is what I did yesterday when I setup my blog on WordPress.com. Overall it was a trivial task which only took a couple of hours to do from sign-up to launch.
The downside of using a service like WordPress.com is that you’re kind of bound to what they offer the general public and as a power user that can be immensely frustrating. It’s no fault of WP. Their business is to cater to a broad audience on WordPress.com and if you’re a power user, they offer the code for you to customize. So I’m not one to complain because they’ve got a great model going & they’re doing right by everyone.
So I was chatting with my friend David Walsh, who BTW is a really talented developer & bares an uncanny resemblance to Kid Rock, about my migration and sharing some of my pain points. Well, here’s what he said:
David Walsh: i can’t let a brotha live on wordpress.com
From there, he proceeded to totally hook me up with a self-hosted WP account of my own; DNS updates and all! That was a very cool thing to do and I’m grateful for his help. This now gives me so much more flexibility to tweak things as I see fit and even dive into PHP a bit, something I’ve been wanting to do but haven’t found the right circumstance to do it in.
This also means that I may have a chance to save the posts from my original blog software, BlogCFC. I have to say that I’ll miss BlogCFC and the tweaks I made to it (some of which ended up in the software). Raymond Camden continues to really make it a great blogging platform and if I was back on a ColdFusion hosting provider, it’d be the first piece of software I’d install. Raymond also offered me BlogCFC hosting (which I am so grateful for as well) but David had already gone through a lot to set me up and I wasn’t going to back out at that point. And I think I’m ready for a new challenge as well. WordPress is a different monster and it’ll force me to rethink some things.
The final change you may have noticed is that the blog is now on its own subdomain. Originally, when you would venture to reybango.com, you’d see the blog. In hindsight, I really should’ve separated out the blog and used the main domain for something else. That’s the case now with the blog residing at blog.reybango.com.
So I want thank David for totally squaring me away. It’s amazing that a person that I’ve only chatted with on IM would be willing to help me out. It truly is a testament to the power of the Internet but I also think it’s a little bit of karma. :)
What? You haven’t written your own Django blog yet? No really, Congrats! WordPress can be a great blogging software and there are a ton of great plugins for it.
Nope not yet! :D I’m actually combing through the WP plugin repo to find some good ones for Twitter & Flickr. Suggestions?
BTW, are there actual DJango-powered blogs out there?
Many thx to @davidwalshblog for hooking me up w/ self-hosted WordPress http://is.gd/rvkB My new blog is great! https://blog.reybango.com
For the record, Rey cropped a beautiful girl out of that picture! :)
Glad to do it Rey!
Hear! Hear! I am all for self-hosted WP sites. You have so much more control. I’ve gone ahead and bought a hosting subscription at hostgator.com. $8/mo for unlimited domains! And with their Fantastico Deluxe, setting up a WP blog takes mere minutes. Highly suggested if you’re planning on doing alot of blogs. I have 4 hosted at this site already and they’re FAST!
Good luck with the self-hosting Rey!