For years I’ve hosted WordPress somewhere, most recently in Azure using Project Nami so that I could store all the posts in SQL Azure. It’s been a good learning experience. It takes some effort to set up, but once done it’s fairly painless, you can even have security updates applied automatically. The variety and power of plugins for WP is amazing. It’s nice to have full control, even if you don’t need it often.

So why move to the arguably less capable version hosted on WordPress.com?  It’s part saving a little bit of time, part trying something new, part wanting to clean up my Azure account before I tackle some new stuff there. None of those are compelling, so maybe also a bit of change for the sake of change!

Moving wasn’t too bad, if not as easy as it might be. The export timed out before all the posts were included, so I had to figure out (again) how to create the “.user.ini” file in the webroot to override that.  That was after I had imported it only to find I was missing posts after 2014 and had to start over. The import went great the second time. Picked a theme, then spent 30 minutes looking at other ones (probably blowing my time savings for the year). I spent the $13 to map my existing sqlandy.com domain and that went smoothly, I changed the nameservers and it even brought over my email settings that point to Google mail. I opened up LiveWriter but the theme seems to not work right – can’t see what I type, so this first post of the year is via the Wordpress web editor.

Tomorrow I’ll start cleaning up Azure. Shouldn’t be hard, right? Web server, database, maybe some other service? Got some other stuff to consolidate, hoping it will be done in an hour. We’ll see.