Contemplating a Change

20 Apr 2011

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By Dawn Sailors In Blog News, Design Geek

Of venue that is. I started this blog a year ago in May after some major life changes that left me feeling a little out of control and creatively stagnant. It was originally intended to be mostly a personal journal of sorts, and the free WordPress.com platform is great for that. Easy to set up, maintain, etc. But with an eye on the future after some new major changes, I’m afraid I may be limited by some of the policies and restrictions. Mainly, I want to be able to edit the actual html of my blog to practice and learn new programming skills but also if I ever decide to monetize this blog through advertising or the like, I wouldn’t be able to do so on the .com platform. And let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to make money doing something they enjoy if given the opportunity?

So I’m considering a move to the .org platform. If you want to read about the differences, you can do that here. From my understanding though, .com, while easier and hosted for free, allows very limited if any advertising and requires a share of that. Not to mention that users don’t have access to the html code for their sites, which can be frustrating. The .org platform is more flexible, more customizable and you can basically do what you want. The drawback is that you have to host it yourself (ie pay for hosting) and you should probably know your way around basic html and ftp usage in order to get set up and maintain your blog. But you also get access to a whole slew of plugins that aren’t available to .com users.

Being that I do want to have access to my code (a personal site is a great way to practice my ever growing programming knowledge), access more plugins, and possibly eventually monetize, I’m thinking .org is the way to go. But it is a little daunting to think of the task of switching everything over, especially since I’m not sure what all is involved, or if there is any automation that can help with that. I guess I’ll shoot an email to some help techs and see what I learn. Fear of extra work shouldn’t stop progress, right???