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Free WordPress Blogs!
In case you haven’t been paying attention, you can now get a free hosted WordPress blog via WordPress.com - (sign up here). This is the blogging platform that I use, and which I can’t recommend highly enough.
Now that it’s free and open to the general public, there’s pretty much no excuse to keep using your old nasty Blogspot addresses. Also, if you have a lot of old content on Blogger or another system that you don’t want to get a rid of, this newest version of WP has a really simple import utility so you can carry over all your old posts.
Anyway, just thought I’d make that announcement because I know there are a lot of people here who are probably interested in starting or upgrading their own blogs. If you do end up signing up there, feel free to drop a link in here or in the forum. Enjoy!
(Cross-posted from my tech blog)
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Allllllright… Where’s this import feature? I’ve been kinda ticked at blogger’s limits for a while, but haven’t really been able to do anything about it
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Actually, I can’t verify they offer that in their free version on the site. You’ll have to login and check the control panel. I was basing that off my recent installation of WordPress 2.0 here on my site, which has that as a default feature. In my version, the options on the control panel have an “Import” button on the right end of the lighter blue band at the top.
Please let me know if it doesnt actually have that option in the WordPress.com version, and I’ll make a note of it in my post.
January 4th, 2006 at 2:35 am
Tim: Anyway, just thought I’d make that announcement because I know there are a lot of people here who are probably interested in starting or upgrading their own blogs. If you do end up signing up there, feel free to drop a link in here or in the forum. Enjoy!
Ahh, I’m a day too late. Since everyone else was doing it, I figured I would too. It allows me the opportunity to present what I’ve learned from my own experience and the information I’ve gathered on my own terms.
Anyone who wants to peek can do so here. Thanks to clancy cavnar for her generous consent to use some of her paintings as illustrations.
January 4th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Manning, glad to see you started a blog!
January 4th, 2006 at 2:58 am
There’s a bit where you can import links. I see no option for importing posts from somewhere else.
January 4th, 2006 at 10:11 am
It’s too bad there’s no import feature; my hosting account is about to expire and I thought I might save myself the $75 annual fee by sigining up for a free blog. Oh well.
January 4th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Your readers should be super careful to verify the features free-wordpress offers: it doesn’t offer everything it does to hosted accounts. From what I’ve read, they’ll be adding stuff on, but there is no published timeline that I know of.
Blogger has come a long way since I used it last, so just make sure you’re not losing anything by switching.
January 4th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
I thought I had found a hack for this… im you got to http://yourusername.wordpress.com/wp-admin/import.php the options show, but blogger import doesn’t work and the rest seem to work, but don’t actually import.
Ine huge thumbs down for the wordpress.com account is that you have very little control over the design of your site. At this time you cannot freely edit your template and the selection of templates is restricted to 12 built in themes.
I am sure they will change this at some point, but who knows when.
January 8th, 2006 at 7:22 am
It is also AGONISINGLY SLOW when it doesn’t want to play properly. There are times when it’s even worse than Blogger (like right now when I’m trying to create a new post).