If you’re seeing this post, it means my DNS changes have propagated and danielbachhuber.com now lives on the one and only WordPress.com. Welcome!
I’ve been thinking about moving my website for a few months now, ever since I joined Automattic. WordPress.com is a piece of software I use every day. By dogfooding it with my personal blog I get to experience it much more like day to day users experience it. I get to see where the software is working and where its pain points are, and improve it where I can. Plus, I get to benefit from the new features we launch on a regular basis (like gorgeous photo galleries).
This morning, I took the plunge. Moving my content over was no problem. I then activated the Manifest theme and spent a couple hours customizing its base design with custom CSS.
And here it is. Now, back to the my real work.
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Do you see blogging in general moving increasingly toward managed solutions like WP.com, Posterous, Tumblr, Flavors.me and Squarespace? How do you reconcile this with truly “owning” your content?
Not necessarily. More than anything, I made the decision to move to WordPress.com because I work on the code base every day and want to help make it the best it can possibly be. With my website hosted here, I can discover bugs, usability issues, etc. in a more real manner because I’m an every day user. I want WP.com to be good enough that I can sincerely recommend it to my friends and family, but in some cases WP.org has better features, flexibility, etc. There’s still work to be done; actually using our software is the best way to discover what needs to be done.
On WP.com, I fully own my content and my identity. If I wanted to move all of my data off WP.com to a new host, it’d be 30 minutes or so of work. In fact, even the theme I’m using is open source and available for download. Automattic has all of its free themes in a public Subversion repository. In fact, most internal code that hasn’t been open sourced just isn’t good enough yet to be made publicly available (yes, there’s ugly code lurking in our code base).