After ten days of blogging on WordPress.org, here I am, back on WordPress.com. It’s a decision made with both hope and regret, but one that I need to make in order to continue the work I started.
Over the past three years on WordPress.com, my ability to write code (PHP and JavaScript in particular) had degraded quite a bit. I had thought that by self-hosting my blog, I’d be more motivated to try new things, and force myself to learn as I inevitably broke things on my own blog. It turns out that such a tactic had the opposite effect. I had every intention to break things and learn, with daily plans even, but I was too timid to put my rusty skills to the test on a live blog.
Considering that, my main blog is now back on WordPress.com, but I’m keeping a few self-hosted test blogs around so I can break things and learn without fear. I still learned quite a bit in just ten days, like how to have a similar setup to WordPress.com, working with caching, choosing a stats program, and how to work with Genericons (which you can do on WordPress.com with certain themes). I even helped fix two bugs in the Authy plugin.
As for the rest of you still on WordPress.org, if you use Jetpack, I submitted a few bug reports and feature requests you might like. One of those might even be my first patch one of these days.
Comments
18 responses to “Back on WordPress.com”
Be brave, put your main blog on a self hosted server and test the hell out of it with dodgy code and mad ideas. It’s what I do! 🙂
I will, give me a few months. 🙂
Seriously! Worst case, VaultPress has your back. 😉
For sure, and I was using VaultPress, and will be again when I move back. 😉
Welcome home! 🙂
Thanks, it’s good to be back! 🙂
[ Smiles ] Welcome back, James!
I am pleased to know that you were brave enough to try out the self-hosted version!
Thanks! 🙂
[ Smiles ] You are welcome, James!
You can always ask me for help with breaking your selfie 🙂 (Also I’ll pimp Genericon’d for self hosting 😉 SHORTCODES)
Genericon’d is awesome! I went ahead without it as it had been bugging me that I couldn’t quite figure it out. Now that I have, I have a lovely Genericon “Follow Elsewhere” widget in my widgets area above, since we can’t exactly use Genericon’d here.
When I’m ready to go again, I’ll take you up on that offer to help break it, but you might regret it. 😉
Welcome back to the fold. 🙂 I also set myself a goal this year of becoming more familiar again with WP standalone. Regretfully, it’s not been easy to follow through on as I’d thought. (Tried to leave the comment on G+ but it wouldn’t post, dangit.)
Thanks! Let’s see how we do at that goal this year. We’re both running out of time, but there’s always next year. 🙂
Jetpack sends out the entire article as an email to subscribers instead of the excerpt. That is not acceptable for driving traffic.
It uses your feed’s setting, so at Settings -> Reading in your blog’s Dashboard, change “For each article in a feed, show” to “Summary”.
It is set up that way and subscribers are still getting the full post…idk.
It shouldn’t be that way. I recommend contacting Jetpack support.
[…] too long ago that I moved to WordPress.org after an almost three-year absence, and then quickly moved back to WordPress.com. I had a lot going on and just wasn’t ready to take the plunge. Now, I am ready to take the […]