This blog is hosted for free WordPress.com. As the result, things happen here that are beyond my control. That’s the tradeoff for not paying for stuff 😦 but the truth is that I have neither the time nor the inclination (at this point) to host my own site and deal with the related frustrations. So, I have learned to live with the restrictions. A couple of things require mention:
- No ads. We are not allowed to have our own ads on these sites. Not a problem for me, since I really don’t want ads, anyway. One thing you can be sure of: no one is paying me to write an opinion here. That’s not to say that you won’t see ads on this site. WordPress.com will put ads on the site, as a way of paying their bills. I can’t see them but some of you may. If you do see them, please be aware that I had nothing to do with the ads and I’m not getting any revenue from them.
- No javascript. The folks at WP.com have said repeatedly that JS is a security issue and will not allow it and other things that they consider security issues on this platform. That’s why I don’t have the LeftyBlogs feed on my blog. The code used to generate the feed is JS. Unfortunately, they do not have an RSS feed, which is allowed here.
- “Possibly related posts.” Friday (and they seem to always do stuff on Fridays 😦 ) the folks at WP.com released a new feature called “Possibly related posts.” This particular feature supposedly links to other posts site-wide (meaning the entire WP.com community) that are related. A quick look at the links that were being provided on my blog revealed that most of the links weren’t even remotely related. Rather than turn off the feature completely (which is the only option allowed at this time), I made a couple of tweaks using CSS to it. First, I styled the code to show that it is WP.com that decided that posts were related, not me. Second, I removed links to blogs other than this one. There are a number of reasons for this but the two main ones are that the posts weren’t related and that I don’t write to drive traffic to other blogs.
Philosophically, I have a problem with the whole WP.com idea of linking to other sites. You will note that I rarely use tags here. The reason is that the tags are site-wide, not just for this blog. The same is true with categories. If you click on the blogging category at the top of this post, you will be taken to a page that shows a list of blogs throughout WP.com that are blogging on the same topic. Alternatively, if you click on “blogging” in the category widget in my sidebar (under “I write about”) you’ll stay here on my blog and see all of the posts in that category. To me, that is as it should be.The worst part about this site-wide, aka global, linking system is that we have some VIP blogs hosted here, like CNN and FOX News. When I started blogging here in February 2006, these guys weren’t here. Now that they are, they naturally dominate everything, always appearing in the Top Blogs and Top Posts categories. I don’t need to drive traffic to them, which is what the global linking ends up doing. (Of course, because they are VIP blogs, their tags and categories don’t link back to the rest of WP.com.)
If anything drives me to self-hosting, it will be this global linking stuff.
UPDATE: It seems that the fine folks at WP.com have updated the “possibly related posts” and overrode both of the CSS hacks that I had implemented. 😡 This makes no sense whatsoever so I’m turning the thing off.
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One other quick note: I’ve added a page about my 3rd Annual Memorial Day Bash. Event details are there (you can also access the page by click on the Details link in the sidebar) and I’ll be updating the page as more information becomes available.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I actually removed the “possibly related posts” altogether because I have a feeling that a some bloggers will begin writing posts with certain keywords just so that they can get linked to by other sites.
I’ve actually thought about going back to using blogger, which I used for the first 6 months or so I was blogging. The primary reason I haven’t already done so is the fact that wordpress lets you set up posts to be published in the future which can come in handy if I have a lot of other things going on and I know I’ll be busy.
Bryan – there are a lot of things to like about WordPress, which is why I chose it in the first place. One thing that doesn’t happen here: hacked blogs. That’s because of the security restrictions (including no javascript). The other thing I really like is the spam control. Akismet does a great job of catching spam Heck, it has caught more than 280,000 spam comments since I got here. That alone is worth something.
And yes, I use the future posts thing myself. That’s the only way I can keep up 😦
Hi, Vivian…Despite the CSS, I see 4 links here under “possible” and only the first 2 are yours.
#3 is Day 4 of 100 details for 100 days
#4 is Few notes on Love’s Ragpicker
I don’t even want to know what #4 is about.
I have a screenshot of this if you’d like it. LMK by email and I’ll send it to you. (at least your links are bold, the others aren’t.)
So I was curious enough to click on both links..maybe you see that in your stats. Anyway, Love’s ragpicker is..I can’t describe it, it’s kinda nothing. But there is a bloggers’ rights badge in the sidebar.
The one I listed as #3 is about crafting with ribbons. Srsly.
Hmm – I see that now. Seems they have overwritten the two pieces of code that I put in. Time to head over to engtech’s place and see if there is a new fix.
Hosted blogging presents too many compromises for my taste. You’ve mentioned a few of them here. It costs me 83 dollars / year for two domains, unlimited subdomains, and all the configurability that I have available.
I’m redesigning my site right now. The work that I’m doing there is probably exactly the sort of thing you say you don’t have time or inclination for. But when I’m done, I’ll have my blog entries separated from news links, a news aggregator that will have it’s own index, categories, and the ability to place the aggregator items on my home page. I’ll also have thirty regions on the page to place different stuff, and filled regions will expand to fill the space left by unfilled ones. It’s going to become much more than a blog. This sort of scalability is way beyond the capabilities of hosted options like WP and Blogspot.
That said, I am a web developer, and a database administrator. The work I’m putting into achieving all of this comes more easily to me than it would to an accountant. 🙂
I, too, have done web development. (My partner on my last such project went on to do the web interface for NASDAQ.) It’s a royal pain, but you get what you pay for. WP is free, and worth every penny.
Hmmm, perhaps a similar sentiment can be put on the health insurance post. When the consumer is not the one footing the bills, things just don’t seem to work very well.
Rick – there are web developers and then there are the rest of us 😉
I need to point out that my hosting may be free but I do pay for a couple of things: domain mapping and CSS editing. I guess that’s part of what makes me mad. Because I pay for CSS, I should be able to use it to eliminate those things that I don’t want, but WP.com overrode those changes by moving the information to files that we don’t have access to due to the nature of the multi-user platform.
You’re paying??!! Oh, hell no! If you’re paying WP anything, you should be able to customize to your heart’s content. Look, Viv, I told you what I pay. $83/year. If you do the math, that’s less than $7/month. My hosting provider is SiteGround. You can install WP, or any of a large number of applications on the domain, by way of a three step wizard, through an application called Fantastico. It’s simple. Mine is becoming complex only because I want it to be more complex and feature rich.
I thought you were abandoning the customization ability for both the simplicity and the free hosting. If it’s only simplicity you want, it’s there with many of the domain hosts out there. If you’re not riding totally free, you can’t be paying a whole lot less than $7/month. IMO, you need to rethink this.
Rick – I have domain hosting for my other site and I’m paying less than that 🙂 Here at WP I’m paying $10/yr for domain mapping and $15/yr for CSS. Like I said, being able to edit CSS only changes the look of the blog, since we have no access to the underlying theme files. (My CSS skills are rudimentary at best.)
The main issue for me is time. I just don’t have the time to deal with my own installation. I want to write, not tinker with the stuff in the background. But one of the reasons I have domain mapping is because I may eventually move over to self-hosting.
Well, what I pay is for 2 domains. I used to be with 1 and 1, where I paid $4.50/month for 1 domain. I could have upgraded to 3 domains with 1 and 1, but Siteground offered Fantastico. This was a selling point for me, because Fantastico enables me to install apps with such ease. I can install any one of six different blogging apps, including WP, A ridiculous number of CMS apps, like Drupal (my platform of choice), PHP Nuke, etc. Forums, calendars, wikis, ad managers, the whole nine yards. It has apps I’d never heard of. All open source. And the install is totally hassle free. A three step wizard. Really. It’s less trouble than what you’ve gone through with the CSS adjustment that didn’t work.
This post has inspired me to follow through with an idea I had previously, anyway. After work today, I’m gonna turn my little test site public, and document my progress in a development blog, on the site that I’m using to test the changes. This is why my posting has been so light lately anyway, so why not use it, right? This could be interesting. Might be a train wreck, but it could also be fun.
To Bryan: Actually Blogger is working to develop the feature that allows you to post ahead. It’s available now if you go to draft.blogger.com and work from there. This is the one feature I loved about WP and I’m so glad they have it on Blogger now.
I’ve been using the scheduled posting feature and I love it. I haven’t had any problems with spam or hacking on my blog. But a get around would be using comment moderation and just screening comments before allowing them. And you can always delete offensive comments or spam, which I’ve done. If I’m not going to be able to monitor relatively often, like if I’m on vacation, I do enable comment moderation to make sure nothing I wouldn’t want makes it to the comments.
It seems like you give up an awful lot of control of your site with WordPress, which would drive me crazy. I’m a control freak and would not appreciate a third party putting things on my site, especially links to drive traffic elsewhere, where I don’t benefit from it.
Also, Blogger lets you have ads; even encourages you to use Google Ad Sense, which they own; and they pay you for the clicks. I don’t take ads either, but if I wanted to, all I’d have to do is sign up. Or, I could make my own arrangements for ads.
Also, giving up JS was the final straw that drove me back to Blogger.