You guys know how this works, right? WordPress.com is this place, where you can host a free blog for nothing, gratis. They use a special “group” version of the WordPress blogging software.
Upside? It’s free, it’s good software, and it’s got some nice tracking and surfing features.
Downside? You can’t really play with the buttons and knobs. Getting your site to look just the way you want it to and embedding interesting things like javascript or MP3 ranges from awkward to deliberately impossible. And your URL has “wordpress” in it, which I have just proven completely incapable of typing correctly on the first try.
Whereas WordPress.org is dedicated to the standalone version of the WordPress software. The software is free, and you can download and play with it to your heart’s content, but you have to pay somebody to host your site. Oh, and you have to do all the fiddly technical things yourself, which is…well, we’ll find out how painful that is together, shall we?
How much of the “look and feel” of the free site is carried over to a hosted site, I really don’t know. I wanted to ask, but I’m sure there’s an FAQ or something and I couldn’t find it. The WordPress FAQ intimidates me. The more something’s been posted on a topic, the bigger the type. At least, I think that’s how it works. All those big ol’ words kind of scare me.
It was worse before, though. The list used to be in alphabetical order, so words got disturbingly bigger and smaller like a ransom note.
January 12, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Hey, whaddya know! I just learned that that creepy FAQ type thing is called a “tag cloud.”