Well, it’s official. Welcome to my new blog. After giving a major blogging solution a try for awhile, I began to find the overall experience pretty substandard. The inability to customize templates easy and have even a semblance of proper navigation (for key pages) began to take its toll.
In the end, I want something that is well-maintained and offers a baseline level of customizability (read: greater than zero) that allows me to maintain an attractive yet professional presence. Given that we (Nina and I) decided to go with the excellent hosting provider, site5.com, to set up a site for business purposes, I figured, what the heck? I can just move my existing content to Wordpress and host it myself.
To my amazement, Wordpress setup on most reputable hosting providers (site5.com being one of them) takes minutes. I was able to download the Wordpress tarball to my top-level web directory and start the install. The only prerequisite to get the installation going was to create a database, which is done painlessly through the control panel. Within minutes I was up and running. Things have sure come a long ways since the days when I had to do everything meticulously at the command line.
And importing existing content from the “old” blogging provider was a snap. I exported from my existing site and imported into the new one.
Anyway, for those of you who want to maintain a bit more professional presence, you can go with a number of freely available solutions, but for under $4-$10/month, there are a number of solutions. I went with site5.com, because they’re seemingly among the few who have eliminated the rather lame storage and bandwidth restrictions. If you’re going to compete with the big boys (read: cloud providers), you can’t be having these ridiculous limits. And besides, if you are hosting sites that take up a lot of bandwidth, it’s just a matter of doing traffic shaping to keep customers from getting out of hand. (Lucky for me, I don’t think there are millions of people reading my blog, but who knows?)
Surf’s up!