I’ve been slightly frustated with wordpress.com for a while now. Don’t get me wrong… it’s a great site and service, especially because they provide high quality blog hosting for free. I’m just not used to having someone else lock down the amount of control I have over my own site. I suppose technically it’s just a blog service, but for nerds like me it becomes the entire online presence.

I got a burr on my butt? Hmm. That doesn’t sound like the right expression… time to go off on a tangent A gnaw in my craw? No. It turns ou the expression I’m looking for is “A bug up my ass” but now that I think about it there probably is something more appropriate for internet publishing on this bastion of excellent English usage of mine. Let’s just assume you get the idea. I suddenly decided to move to my own domain and run wordpress myself rather than having it hosted.

The other reason I decided to do it is that while doing domain DNS admin for the various other sites I have registered on godaddy.com I poked around and discovered that spasticon.com was still available. So, I registered it… configured my already existing hosting solution at hostrocket.com to add the new spasticon.com domain and… voilà.

The good news is that I can now modify my blog a lot more. I can add custom plugins and modify the design more. For example… I can now use a Flickr plugin to manage and post pictures to this website while writing the content. That’s cool. The one I picked to work with even does the nifty lightbox feature. Try it out by clicking any of the images in this post. I think you’ll like. I definitely did.

That’s not to say that wordpress didn’t have a good solution too, but… well… it’s no Flickr.

The bad news is that all the plugins and site management that was being done by the wordpress.com team I’ll have to now do myself. Oh well. I’m a nerd. I can live with that.

Now I just need to find all the plugins I liked on wordpress.com, like the category cloud… and I need to fix the links. The ones that came with the default install and this blix theme aren’t good.