This evening as I left work I flipped the switch on my Domain Name Server to direct the SMUG domain to this self-hosted WordPress installation. Within about an hour it seems the traffic was being directed appropriately, as you see in the comments on the post below.
I had several reasons for making the change, and in addition to doing 300-level courses in the Blogging curriculum based on my experience in migrating to self-hosted WordPress, I’m going to plan to highlight some of those advantages I was pursuing.
One downside of WordPress.com is that it strips out all javascript, so I was limited in the kinds of widgets I could embed in the sidebar or within posts. So while I could include a single YouTube video (as in this Twitter 103 course), I couldn’t embed a playlist like the one below, which features several videos of Mayo Clinic patients and their families sharing their stories:
There’s no way to do that with WordPress.com! Pretty cool, huh?