As I recently posted, I moved from the wordpress.com to a self-hosted solution at Laughing Squid.  I recently posted in part I and part II about something to think about when moving to such a solution.  And while I am enjoying the flexibility that being self-hosted affords, there are some definite downsides that really show the value of the wordpress.com offering.  The first is that the themes are plug-n-play in the wordpress.com environment, you just pick one and go.  No dealing with debugging themes, making widgets work and understanding how to backward engineer someone else’s CSS.

The other thing I’ve noticed is the drop-off in traffic.  Now, of course, some is expected because I moved blog locations and also due to time constraints, I haven’t been able to blog as often, that hurts readership.  What I have come to realize though is the value of the wordpress.com tagging which apparently drove me a moderate amount of traffic and also I would come up in wordpress.com search.  Well, guess I’ll need to be more self-sufficient to get my traffic ramped up.  Let me know if you have any creative ideas that does not involve buying Google Ad Words.