Taking the plunge

Hey there fellow sewists!

Well, there are some changes on the horizon at Mrs. Hughes.  Whilst working on an exciting project due out next month, I have familiarized myself and found out how wonderful working with WordPress.org is.  If you aren’t familiar, wordpress.com is a free blogging site where you have limited control and wordpress.org is self-hosted blogging software where you are free to do whatever you want.  I currently run on wordpress.com and I am transitioning to wordpress.org.  This is usually a seamless process for folks on WP, but as I have a domain name and my site was redirecting to that domain from wordpress.com, I have some hoops to jump through to get everything running, which, quite frankly is a pain in the @ss…..

If you’re interested in taking the plunge and switching over to wordpress.org, Sophie has written an excellent post about how to do exactly that.

If you are in a similar situation as myself, you will want to first cancel your domain mapping and redirecting (mine is through WordPress).  I also opted to transfer my domain name from GoDaddy to the awesome webhosting company A Small Orange, which is also where I have set up my hosting for both myself and the upcoming project I referred to above.  Transferring your domain name adds a wee bit of trickiness as you have many steps go through and you have to wait up to seven days for this to go through.  Because of this, my own domain is currently down….. Luckily, I still have my wordpress.com address (missushughes.wordpress.com) linking from sites such as Bloglovin’, so there won’t be much downtime as far as most readers are concerned and you most likely won’t notice the change until I have my new awesome site set up.  **Also, if you are in a similar situation as myself with a redirecting service like wordpress.com has, change your nameservers BEFORE transferring your domain.  I didn’t do this, so I’m stuck in lockdown until my domain transfer goes through….. Otherwise, I would have been able to set up my new site and get things rollin’.  So learn from my mistakes!

I do have some new dresses to share with you, but I may just wait until I have completed this transitioning process.  If you are serious about blogging,  want more flexibility, want to continue blogging for a while and perhaps want to make money off your site, I recommend going this route.  The costs are minimal and it won’t take you much time to figure out.  In comparison, WordPress.com charges you SOOOO much more to add similar features than it does just to pay a few bucks a month for your webhosting and to register your domain.  You are better off being the Queen (or King) of your domain than just being a freemium renter.

Feel free to ask me any questions about this transition and I will attempt to answer them.  FYI:  I don’t have experience with other blogging formats and can’t help you there.