hosting – Changing Way

Where on the Web? Wither Yahoo?

What combination of web sites and services to use?

My own answers include:

This site–changingway.org–will remain my home on the web. The move to the new host–SiteGround–is complete.
WordPress as Content Management System. Keen users of WordPress might want to check out the page on the choice and customization of the Twenty Sixteen theme.
Google, for many services, including email.
Facebook, a service I dislike used by a high proportion of the people I like.
Yahoo, which deserves its own list of points.

Yahoo!

Should I, like millions of people, keep using my Yahoo email? Or should I, like many others, abandon it?
Should I continue to use Flickr as my main photo site? I don’t think that Yahoo did much with Flickr after acquiring it.
Did Yahoo fumble the web? That’s a wider question, as is…
How will the Yahoo/Verizon deal work out?

That’s enough, before I veer any further off topic. What combination of web sites and services to use?

Changing Host

This site, having been at WordPress.com for many years, is moving to SiteGround. So is management of the domain changingway.org.

The move involves bits and pieces spread across several organizations:

SiteGround
Automattic, who run WordPress.com
GoDaddy, who used to manage the domain changingway.org
Other organizations involved with domain management
Google, where the email associated with this site used to live (and will probably live again)

The site content seems to have arrived safely at SiteGround. Everything else should be fully settled in soon.

WordPress Hosting: WP Engine and Page.ly

WordPress hosting: does the world need more options? Perhaps it does.

WP Engine seeks to serve what they believe is a large market: businesses that need more customizability than WordPress.com hosted accounts offer at low-end prices but more ease of use and scalability support than the millions of WordPress.org users get running open source installs on their own or rented servers.

For $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. Scalability durring traffic spikes is one of the company’s biggest sales propositions.

I think that the WP Engine folks are on to something. Follow the above link, or see Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post at RWW, if you want to see who these folks are. As I write this, the comments on Marshall’s post are an amicable exchange between the WPE folks and their counterparts at Page.ly, who offer a similar service.

Page.ly seems to be a little further along than WPE, particularly with respect to partnerships. Page.ly has an affiliate program in place (yes, that is an affiliate link in the previous paragraph) and explicitly encourages resellers. But, without turning this post into an over-optimistic echo chamber, I think that there is room for multiple strong competitors in the premium WordPress hosting space, so all the best to WPE as it launches and invites.

Music Journalism is the New Piracy

Good post title, huh? I didn’t make it up. I copied it. It’s fine for me to copy it, as long as I give proper attribution. Even if there were no such thing as fair use, it would still be fine for me to copy “Music Journalism is the New Piracy.”

That’s because the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Tim Jones, who posted under the same title at the EFF’s blog, placed that content under the Creative Commons Attribution License. That’s the same license I use for this blog, by the way. Tim’s post is about the recent deletion of six music blogs at Blogger, which is owned by Google.

Although the takedowns were made in the name of stopping piracy, the deleted blogs do not appear to have been hotbeds of illegal file-sharing… In at least one case… accusations of copyright infringement were almost certainly incorrect.

Tim’s post links to a list of web hosts that cherish free speech. I wasn’t previously aware of the list, or of any of the hosts on it, so I thought it worth remarking on.

Thinking of Self-Hosting

WordPress.com has hosted Changing Way for almost three years now. I’m thinking of moving it to a different host, although sticking with WordPress. It would then go back to being a WordPress.org blog, that is, a blog running the free software that can be downloaded from the .org site. That’s not because I have complaints about WordPress.com.

I agree with timethief that due to WordPress.com’s free and premium features, wordpress.com is not only a great place to start blogging, but may even be your last stop. I agree with the rest of her recent post on making the move to self-hosting: the official account of the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is very good; most people make the move to .org intending to make money from their blog.

My thought of moving is financial in a couple of ways. First, it’s almost time to pay for another year of my premium features (mapping the domain changingway.org to this blog, and CSS). Second, I’m paying for hosting and am running some WordPress blogs at WanderNote.com, so I could host this one there at no extra cost. But I don’t see Changing Way as a moneymaker.

But the two scissor-blades that might cut Changing Way loose from WordPress.com and send it to WordPress.org (and to WanderNote) are… WordPress.com and WordPress.org. There are some WordPress.com restrictions that I find irritating, even though I can understand why they are in place: no plugins, limited selection of themes, no MP3 files (yes, I could get another premium features, yes MP3s can live elsewhere and still be played, but…) and son on.

From the other side, WordPress.org became rather easier to administer with the release of version 2.7 just over a year ago. Upgrading to a new version since then requires just a single click from the WordPress admin interface, rather than leaving WordPress to move files around. Finding and installing plugins became similarly straightforward, and simpler management of themes followed in 2.8.

I have a few qualms about moving. For example, the WordPress.com shortcodes aren’t part of base WordPress.org. But I don’t see any of them as a showstopper.