courtesy cogdogblog

Just a week after the first post to this blog, the limitations of the hosted version of Wordpress have driven me to self-host the open source version on my own server.  As I discussed earlier, self-hosting was most definitely not my preference, but the restrictions Wordpress.com – even with a paid subscription – are a bit too inflexible.

Specifically, I found these:

• Limited types of files can be uploaded – no flash, no video, nothing exotic etc.
• Can’t embed flash or javascript tags in posts
• Limited number of themes
• Limited number of widgets (about 10)
• No support for 3rd party plugins
• Can’t edit themes or CSS ($$)
• Can’t host on your own domain ($$)

A couple of the items listed here ($$) are available with a paid upgrade, but I figured if I’m going to pay, might as well pick up the rest of the features as well.

So this post marks the first on a self-hosted installation of Wordpress.  I took the liberty of changing to the ‘elite’ theme available at http://wpzone.net/, I added the WP-Cumulus plugin Tag Cloud, and of course installed mysql along the way.

In my initial assessment, I opted for Movable Type which supports my preferred database, Postgres.  While I still stand by this requirement for business related sites and sites that need the blog to be integrated with other user facing systems, for this personal blog, I bit the bullet and stood up a basic mysql installation.  We’ll see how it goes.