(Editor’s Note: the problems with the migration annoyed me, and I’m impatient, so I’ve returned to hosting WordPress myself. I’ll leave my issues with the migration on this site in case they help someone else make the decision whether to migrate to the hosted version of WordPress.)
By now, I should be aware that my hunches and intuitions rarely turn out well.
Earlier today I got the bright idea to move my blog to WordPress.com. Since I run your basic, run of the mill blog, I thought it might be a good idea to save time and money by letting WordPress take care of the hassles of upgrading, server maintenance, and bug squashing. It isn’t as though I don’t have the technical chops to do these things myself, but I find that these things sometimes get in the way of creating content, and I’m all for anything that might make creating content a more pleasant experience.
I’d read Marshall Krotscheck’s thoughts on WordPress.com and how it compared to TypePad. There’s a lot of back and forth, and a lot of chest bumping going on in that piece and in the comments, but I walked away from the piece with the idea that moving my self-hosted blog to WordPress.com would be a Sunday walk in the park.
It wasn’t.
My domain resolved within the hour, and all seemed well. I’ve temporarily lost mail for this domain because it takes Google five days to release a Google Apps for Domain account, but I don’t get much email at this domain anyway, so that’s the least of my worries.
The greatest annoyance was that even though I suspected I had everything set up correctly, the domain mapping would not point to the correct address. It worked for about 10 minutes this afternoon, but stopped with absolutely no warning. I would try to pull up cecily.info, and I’d be greeted with the empty root directory of my former domain.
Hardly an optimal solution.
I tried again a few hours later, and still no domain mapping. Then, like a bright flash of sunshine on a dreary, overcast day, the mapping started working again around 10:00 pm. I started adding widgets to the sidebar and promptly lost the domain mapping yet again.
Two hours have passed since I experienced the last mapping snafu, and I’m not totally convinced that I won’t see it again over the course of the next 72 hours. I’ve also noticed a few limitations between WordPress.com and a self-hosted WordPress blog, namely that WordPress.com doesn’t allow custom JavaScript (except for Google and YouTube). I’ve lost Apture functionality, something I’ve come to really depend on for enriching blog posts, and I’ve also lost the ability to post tweets to my sidebar. Anil Dash was right to point this out in his response to Krotscheck. Not only that, WordPress.com has such a limited number of widgets available that the limitations of having WordPress.com host your blog far outweigh the benefits of this arrangement.
I still think that there’s value in hosted blog solutions, and it’s a feature that continues to grow in popularity as more bloggers decide that they don’t have the skills to monkey around in code, or that they just don’t have the time to tinker the way they used to. I’m going to keep this blog here for the next little while (especially since I’ve dropped $25 on mapping and the ability to edit CSS), but I’m seriously thinking of signing up for a TypePad account and kicking their tires for a bit.
Update: I thought it might be useful for future reference (and in case anyone at WordPress is watching) to keep a list of bugs/weird behaviour I’ve encountered since making the switch:
- If I go to cecily.info while logged in to wordpress.com and click the “Edit This” link on any post, I get a 500 internal server error.
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