This weekend has seen a frenzy of activity as my wife and I moved the Tester Thoughts blog to it’s new home on a self-hosted WordPress server. There are several benefits to doing this:
- I have more control over security and performance tuning, so hopefully you should see a speed increase.
- I added the capability to embed code with syntax highlighting which should hopefully make the subsequent posts more readable as we dive into some Ruby code
- each post has modern accoutrements – there are links to share posts on various social networks and stars to allow you to provide feedback without the overhead of adding a comment
- New blogger! My wife is joining the blog as a co-author. From time to time, she’ll be posting about things. She generally takes a more business-focused approach to me, both to testing and to business analysis. She’s off to a great start with her post on technical debt, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else she has to write about.
Thanks for reading!
I have personally found wordpress.com offers everything you mentioned and more, plus it’s free. I often embed ruby or C# code with syntax highlighting (see: http://watirmelon.com/2011/04/05/tryselenium-org-in-watir-webdriver/), you can add any many of those pesky ‘share’ buttons to your heart’s content (I choose not to), and we have multiple bloggers (about 8 I think) on Watir.com.
Plus I don’t need to worry about it going down or running out of RAM. WordPress.com know what they’re doing performance wise when they host some of the biggest blogs on the planet (CNN, Flickr, RedHat, Time, BBC) on the same infrastructure.
They automatically add things like iPad and iPhone specific versions without me needing to do anything, which I think is great (view http://watirmelon.com on your iPad to see what I mean).
You can choose not to have advertisements on your self hosted wordpress blog, but that’s a paid option anyway on wordpress.com, and I personally find them so unobtrusive I don’t mind having them around.
Just my opinion obviously, I’ll be keen to see how you find self hosting.
I agree – WordPress.com did a great job. I didn’t know about it supporting syntax highlighting, so I guess I didn’t explore it well enough, but I didn’t move just for that though – I’ve had several people asking me of late about the idea of running a self-hosted blog. It may or may not be the right decision for them, depending on what they’re looking for, but now I can at least speak to the effort involved. I also needed hosting anyhow for some other ideas floating around in my head, and wordpress.com would not have worked for that. Since my blog was dormant for so long, it seemed like a good canary to try out the hosting. Finally, the move prompted me to do some long overdue cleanup on the old posts (mostly adding tags and cleaning up the categories, plus deleting some chaff and updating long dead links). It’s a minor thing, but some of those posts still get hits, and I feel better having spruced up. I probably would never have gotten to it without moving the blog.
Thanks for the comment, Alister! I’m excited to see how this works out too.