Ok, so this is the first post of 2007, and it isn’t too interesting, but I intend to get back to posting soon. I am very busy at work, and since I don’t write about work here I don’t have much to post to the blog.
The big news is that I have moved to WordPress.com. What does this mean? This means I no longer need to host it myself.
Here is a quick list of the pro’s for hosting your site on WordPress.com:
- No host / ISP required
- Its free, unless you want to have a custom domain name (that only costs you 10 a year)
- You don’t need to install or maintain software
- It’s portable. If you ever want to move to your own hosted server, you can export your blog (comments and all) and then re-import it into your own hosted solution.
There are some minor downsides – you need to watch the drive space, they only give you 50 MB, but my photos are all on Flickr, videos on Youtube and my blog is under 10 MB with over 300 posts. Seeing that 300 posts took me 5 years – it is good enough for now.
Lastly, there is one other thing WordPress doesn’t allow – SWF/Flash files and custom JavaScript. This is for security reasons – someone could embed bad JavaScript into a SWF file and compromise your system. This is all good, and I can live with that.
I haven’t really looked at WordPress yet because I set up my blogs through cPanel and use whatever is available. You make some good points, though, so maybe I should be abit more discerning?
I was using cPanel before, but the issue is that if you don’t update your software, you are opening your self and your readers up to security issues. Security Now had a recent podcast on SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting. Since I work in the network security sector, I tend to worry more about issues like these then your average user.
At least if someone else is maintaining it, I don’t need to.