Is free, hosted blogging the answer?

16 October, 2024 - Categories: blogging - Tags: WordPress, Dave Winer, tilde sites

By Steven Rosenberg

Dave Winer makes me think. He’s creating tools that work with (I presume) the WordPress and Mastodon APIs in order to make the writing experience better and the publishing experience seamless.

With the kind of flexibility that exists on WordPress.com, you can host for free with a subdomain on wordpress.com, or for between $4 and $25 per month (aka $48-$300 per year) for your own domain.

There are a lot of extras, many available with the free plan. There’s a newsletter feature — both free and paid. WP also gives you a presence on the Fediverse that somehow hooks into potential comments (and which is a bit hard to understand at this point).

I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been a “serious” WordPress.com blogger, though I have a lot of entries on this site and have created at least a half-dozen WP blogs for other people over the years.

There’s something to be said for a free site where you don’t have to worry about maintenance.

Considering what hosting costs, $48 a year is pretty reasonable, though it’s hard to beat $0, which is what I’m paying now.

I have $0 hosting on a couple of tilde sites, and if they did disappear, I could always move to another one. But WordPress.com seems to be in it for the long haul. I’d love to know officially if dormant blogs from decades past remain live. (Note from 8/2025: I've been told the answer is "yes.")

And much like Dave, I’d love a tool that lets me post to WordPress without having to be in WordPress. (Note from 8/2025: Dave did develop this. It's called Wordland.)

The elephant in the room this week/month is WordPress BDFL (or maybe NSBDFL) Matt Mullenweg’s trademark dispute/shakedown/war against hosting provider WP Engine. You don’t like to see it, and if you’ve ever had a peek behind the Automattic curtain, what you see isn’t necessarily what you want to have seen.

One thing a system like WordPress does for a writer is make it easy to just write and get the formatting done with as little mucking as possible.

Later: I returned to this post in the WP mobile app. In the WP world, things are set up for you. Writing and editing on the phone Are there third-party apps that already exist that allow me to write and edit WP entries in a quick/dirty/easy way?