02.37 pm

Just a quick update for any of you who might be wondering what’s going on in the “Winter and the Increasingly Recalcitrant WordPress” saga… Goodness knows how WordPress intends for their users who rely on phones and tablets for their blogging needs – I feel for them, poor dears, but at the moment that’s not my worry. Julian and I are about half way through the process of finding out how we move to, and/or cross over from¹ WordPress.com, to WordPress.org. I’ve threatened to move away from WordPress many times, but this latest stupidity with the mutilation of their perfectly good and eminently usable Editor has been the straw that’s finally broken this poor old camel’s back. I’ve had enough, and I’ll be moving on.

Essentially, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are the same – I suppose you could virtually call them sister-sites – however WordPress.com dictates to you what you can and can’t do, which Templates you can use, and charge like wounded bulls for other, “Premium” Templates… and they can pull silly and unnecessary swifties on you – like this latest piece of nonsense – whenever they like. In return, they do all the backups, administration stuff, and sort out any software problems if and when they occur.

WordPress.org on the other hand, still run the WordPress software (it’s a piece of blogging software, you know, as well as being the name of a well-known blog-hosting site!) but you do “the lot”! The backups, the admin stuff, the bug-fixing – everything, including finding your own kitchen sink uhhh… blog host. If anything goes wrong with the Template you’re using, well, you have to work out how to fix it – no-one else will do it for you! There are quite literally hundreds – probably thousands – of extremely nice-looking third-party WordPress Templates from all over the ‘Net that you can download – WordPress.com won’t let you use them, but that you can install and use them with WordPress.org – or if you’re clever enough, you can even write your own Template from scratch! If you’re not too technically minded (like me!) WordPress.org has (or say that they have – I haven’t had a good look yet!) a very large and helpful user-base and forum where you can get help if you can’t nut it out yourself – so I reckon it can’t be too hard, especially as we already have a hosting site that we can use to host my blog – we’ve used it for our own personal Web Sites (now largely abandoned, unfortunately!) for years and years…

So “Watch This Space” for the latest updates on our imminent move away from WordPress.com Dictatorship!

¹That should really read “I’m in the process of”, because it’s my blog, but I use the term “we’re in the process of” because it’ll be Julian doing all the setting-up of, and organising of, the Big Move!