A couple of months ago I moved my blog to WordPress.com. I liked WordPress.com. It was easy to setup and there wasn’t really any maintenance. But, once I started getting more familiar with WordPress, I realized that hosting on wordpress.com had some limitations regarding using plugins and customizing my site. For instance, one of the things I want to do on this site is to highlight recipes that I make. There are several recipe plugins available for WordPress that make this easier than manually formatting them. I was not able to use these on wordpress.com. I understand why. Wordpress.com is a shared environment and as such, there is simply too much risk in having people mess with the infrastructure of the environment. If someone installs a bad plugin for instance it could cause havoc for everyone on the platform.
So a couple of weeks ago I installed WordPress on one of our Rackspace servers (SSGI is a Rackspace reseller) and moved the blog to that environment using wordpress.org. Once I got everything back up and running, I started looking at the various plugins that are available. There are a bunch. So I installed 2 recipe plugins and at the moment I’m experimenting with them to see which one I like the most. Once I’ve decided I will start posting some recipes.
Today, I downloaded JetPack, a plugin created by WordPress (Automatic actually) themselves. This plugin is a set of tools that helps me monitor the site, keeps stats on visitors, automatically posts to Twitter and Facebook when I publish a new post and a bunch of other stuff. Very cool!
Even though I have been blogging for several years on blogger.com, this whole experience has been very interesting. I see a lot of things I can do with this site. It’s just a matter of getting (making) time to work on it. I want to keep it interesting and hopefully useful to my visitors. So now that the plumbing is in place, I will be posting more often. So stop back or better yet, subscribe and let me know what you think.
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