A fellow blogger recently asked, “What’s the difference between hosting yourself and just doing it with wordpress.com?” I get this question a lot, and I realize I have never written a post about it. So I thought I’d explain.
Wordpress.com is the website where you can start up a free blog and get it hosted for free on the Wordpress servers. It’s something like Blogger, another free blogging company. And, just as with Blogger where your blog’s domain has a “.blogspot.com” after it, all the free Wordpress.com blogs have the “.wordpress.com” after it. For example, I have a Wordpress blog called www.newyorktraveler.wordpress.com. It’s free for me– it was free to create, free to set up, and it’s free for me to maintain.
Wordpress.com blogs have stricter regulations than Blogger blogs. Wordpress does not allow sponsored posts; you cannot access the database files to your blog, which means you cannot customize it wholly and you may only choose from a select (albeit large) group of blog themes; you cannot place widgets or ads in your sidebar (such as Entrecard, Adgitize, etc). And last I heard, unless it changed somewhere along the way, Wordpress inserts ads into your blog periodically.
Wordpress.org is the website that showcases the blogging software (the “platform” they call it) that you may use for free on your own hosted blog. The Wordpress.org software is installed onto your web host’s server– you install it. It’s not difficult to install, but it’s a technical process even though web hosts have made it as easy as possible. I recently installed two new ones for my daughters, so this is all fresh in my mind.
Wordpress.org software hosted on your own web hosted server will NOT assign a domain name for you. You must register one yourself, at eNom, Godaddy, or even through Google (which has the least expensive option, at $10). Your domain name is a “house address” of sorts. You want to build a dwelling located at that house address, but you need two things– a house and a rented lot. The “house” is the Wordpress.org software and the “rented lot” is the web host you choose.
I’ll discuss more about getting a self-hosted Wordpress.org blog in the near future. I hope this helps clear up a little about the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org blogs.
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I was aggravated to see it.
Haloscan Closing Its Doors
Feb 6
Posted by Mrs. Mecomber in Blogger, blogs, conversion programs | No Comments
Ouch.
Haloscan, that blog commenting software that has been around for years, is closing the service. This is from their website.
Haloscan was very popular with Blogger, since Blogger’s commenting functions are woefully inadequate (even after a few small tweaks by Google). I tried Haloscan a few years ago, and wasn’t too impressed. Of course, the Blogger commenting functions are terrible. But rather than continue to work with Blogger, I just went to Wordpress and my own self-hosted blogs. It’s been a great experience, with Wordpress.
Regarding Haloscan, some bloggers are afraid they may lose all their comments across hundreds of posts. I *think* Haloscan is offering a free comment migration back to your original blog host, through various third-party vendors. Not sure, though, because it seems some things are still up in the air. Read the FAQs here.
Haloscan is closing February 20.
Tags: Blogger, blogs, comments, Haloscan