Moving to hosted blog software? [update]
I am thinking about moving my blogs to a hosted blog software service like WordPress.com or blogger.com. This would reduce the amount of work that I would need to do to keep the software up to date. Currently, I need to manually upgrade my installation of WordPress when ever a new version comes out, or if new versions of the plugins are made available.
Also since don’t have the ftp server enabled on my server, this would make adding/upgrading plugins a lot easier.
I am leaning towards WordPress.com, as it is an easy export of my blog into that server. (I have already done this.) I would just need to pay $10 to have my domain pointed to their servers.
Update: I am going to stick with running WordPress on my own server. There are several things that are missing from WordPress.com:
- You can’t have a custom permalink format
- You can’t upload themes or plugin (Adsense and Bad Behavior plugins are not available)
- If I don’t want their ads, I need to pay an extra $30 a year.
Cancelling Plaxo
I have finally decided to cancel my Plaxo account. I was not pushed over the edge when Plaxo was spamming people with invites. Also, I didn’t cancel my account when Plaxo was sending birthday notifications for friends of friends or for business contacts.
The problem that I have been having with Plaxo is how it deals with imported data. For example, when you associate a flickr account to your Plaxo account, Plaxo creates an album in your Plaxo account. This album shows your public flickr photo. I have two problems with Plaxo’s integration.
- Photos do not include links to flickr page for that photo. I believe that this part of the terms of service of flickr to include that link.
- Plaxo implements its own comment system for photos. Personally, I want all comments for photos entered on the flickr page itself.
I like how Facebook integrates with flickr, with the Flickr app. On Facebook, an is added to your News Feed, but clicking on it will take you to the Facebook pages.
Plaxo does have a good solution for synchronizing contacts. I have used it to synchronizing contacts between Thunderbird, Outlook and my iPhone. Since I have switched to Google Mobile Sync, I don’t have a need for Plaxo.
