Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at possibly moving this blog to another platform and/or another host. For the past few years, it has been running along with my other sites on my shared hosting plan from 1and1. I don’t have a problem with 1and1. They’ve been good to me. I’ve had no noticeable downtime in the several years I’ve been with them.
My problem is that WordPress is constantly being updated. Every week, it seems, there’s a new version that has to be installed to keep from having the latest and greatest exploits. Don’t get me wrong, I love that the WordPress community is keeping everything up to date. It is just annoying to have to install updates all the time. (Not that a Wordpress update is even all that hard….upload some files to FTP and then run one update script…but I tend to have better things to do.)
My first thought was to look at some hosted solutions. I did a trial run at SquareSpace after hearing about them on several podcasts that I listen to. SquareSpace seems to be a great hosting platform for people that #1 don’t have any other hosting plans, and #2 know a lot about CSS and site design. Unfortunately, I don’t fit into either of those categories. So…. while SquareSpace is great for a lot of people, it is not for me. Then I took a look at WordPress.com. I’m using a self installed, self hosted version of Wordpress right now. Wordpress.com is the WordPress.org commercial side. Wordpress.com does all the hosting and the updates automatically. You just pay a certain amount per year to be able to use your own domain name. However….This didn’t seem to work out for me either. It doesn’t seem able to use plugins all that well, and getting themes and things into it seemed a little difficult.
Having not found a hosted solution I liked, I checked into some other self-hosted solutions. I tried Movable Type. That is the most awkward system ever to try to self-install. It takes a database, sure. But then you can apparently host several blogs off of one install-base and getting the URLs to actually point to where you want them to seems almost impossible. To those of you out there using a movable type self install, I congratulate you for figuring all that out.
I finally decided to just keep my WordPress self-installed like it is now. I think that doing an update that takes maybe 5-10 minutes every few weeks is a lot easier than having to learn a new system altogether. So, at least for now, LucasQualls.com will remain a self-installed, self-hosted WordPress blog.
ALSO……I added a plugin for mobile. If you load my blog page from a mobile phone, you will get a version of the page that is mobile-friendly. Touchscreen phones (Android, iPhone, etc) will get a version that is more “finger friendly” and other phones such as BlackBerry and ‘normal” (dumb) phones will get a very basic looking page. However, this means that people can load my blog from anywhere they are. This is handy because I know a lot of people get Twitter updates on their mobile devices and this blog auto-updates my twitter feed.
This is just an update as to where I stand on what I’m using these days. I will probably be changing my theme over the next little bit because I’ve decided it looks too cluttered. Any suggestions, post them in the comments or send to me on Twitter (@lukenova).
I was the first person to register and pay for my ticket to BarCamp Jonesboro!
