Is it Time to Move On

Twitter got me thinking…

I’m not sure when I first started playing with the idea of blogging.  2005?  I know in 2006 I started using myspace, but there was one before then that is gone, gone, gone.  Yahoo 360.  I think there were like 10 users total and eight of them were porn spam.  A pretty pathetic service.  Myspace was the first place I wrote anything with any degree of regularity, but it wasn’t until I started toying with Blogger that I tried to post daily, or multiple times a day as it turned out.  That was Nobember 2008.  In December 2012 I moved everything here to wordpress.com.  It wasn’t spur of the moment, but it almost was.  I think I debated moving for a few days before I did it.  Maybe as long as a week.  I can’t remember.  Of course I could always actually look at my own blog to find out for sure, but that’s not the point of this.

Yesterday word got out that Twitter is planning a major shift in their service.  The 140 character limit is going to be replaced with a 10,000 character limit.  They say that your feed will stay at 140 characters, but if a post is longer than that users will need to click a button to see the rest.  When I read this I wrote a tweet with my first thoughts on the subject:

10,000 characters per tweet? But I already have a service that does that. It’s called @wordpressdotcom See? https://t.co/gfHMejsMlX

—  (@RobJ_) January 5, 2016

The reference to @wordpressdotcom wasn’t there to start with.  Originally it just said @wordpress.  But I changed it because I don’t really use wordpress, right?  I use wordpress.com.  There’s a difference.

But what about that difference?  I went with .com instead of .org because I didn’t want to pay for hosting.  I still don’t want to pay for hosting, or for a domain name, but what am I missing out on?  There are a lot of things I did with Blogger that I can’t do now.  Specifically embedding content from other sites.  I can do Flickr and Youtube and Vimeo and Soundcloud, and I found a work around for Alonetone, but wouldn’t it be nice to actually use HTML in my posts?  To be more precise, wouldn’t it be nice to use any HTML I want in my posts rather than the few tags .com lets me use?  Also, recently I found myself bitching here about how I can’t find “the right” theme for me.  Wouldn’t it be nice if I could actually edit the theme I chose myself?  I could do that in Blogger but I can’t do that here.

After pondering these deep questions for about 20 seconds I thought to myself, is it time to move over to wordpress.org?  If it weren’t for paying for hosting I’d already be there.  I recall saying when I moved to .com that I would probably eventually switch to .org.  That was three years ago.  Is it time?

It might be.