System13.org and some WordPress.com love

Today, WordPress.com released yet another feature: domain registration and mapping. This basically lets WordPress.com users use their own domain name for their blog. If you don’t already have a domain name bought, you can buy one through your blog dashboard. Once the domain name propagates (it took mine about 2 minutes), you can make your domain name the primary address for your blog. WordPress.com automagically redirects to the correct address. So, getting a domain name for your WP.com blog won’t break all of the links to your posts. People will just be directed to your posts at your new address.

As you can guess from the title of this post (or from the address bar, if you visit my blog directly, as opposed to via feed), I grabbed the domain name system13.org. I was hoping system13.com or .net would be open, but alas, they were both taken earlier this year in August. Kind of odd, actually; that was just shortly after I started this blog. Darn. Ah well.

Honestly, I didn’t really have to have a domain name for my blog here. I’ve been quite happy with system13.wordpress.com for months now, and I could continue happily blogging at that address indefinitely. So, why buy the domain name? Quite honestly, to give a bit of kudos to the WordPress.com guys. I think they deserve it. Since I started blogging a few years ago, I’ve used / test-driven a lot of different blogging platforms:

• Blogger
• TypePad
• WordPress (with my own hosting)
• And finally, WordPress.com

Out of all of those, my experience with WordPress.com has been by far the best. When I first started using Blogger, and up until I switched to WordPress, the performance was awful. Half the time you couldn’t log in. Half the time when you could log in, Blogger would refuse to post; other times, it’d act like it posted your entry, but instead, it would actually eat your post. In general, it sucked. I can’t really comment on Blogger’s recent performance though, seeing as I’ve not used it in a long time.

TypePad was alright, but the pricing is a bit steep considering what you get. It’s really steep when you consider the fact that you get a better blogging platform with WordPress, which is free. (I’m not biased, am I? ;)) Even if TypePad were free, though, I’d still prefer WordPress.

Stand-alone WordPress (i.e., hosted on my own webspace) was great, barring the fact that I always had to worry about hosting issues. Invariably, there were hosting problems. Site unavailable; the server my site was on was too crowded, and thus, my site was slow; permission problems on the files, which threw ugly database errors at me. That, and there was the fact that I had tinkeritis, and every time I’d mess with something, I’d break something. But I digress..
My experience with WordPress.com has been awesome. In the few months I’ve been blogging here, I’ve never tried to log in and it not work. It’s never lost any of my posts. Akismet catches basically 99.999% of the spam comments that come through. And, besides paying for the domain and custom CSS, it’s all been free. I’ll be able to use my domain and CSS until late into 2007. Where could I find a webhost that offers awesome service, unlimited space and bandwidth, and great features, all for $30/year? I don’t think it’s going to be happening.

Thanks for all the work, WordPress.com folks. You guys rock.

Ah, one more bit to the folks linking to my blog: if you want to change your links to point to system13.org, that’s cool. If not.. that’s cool, too. People will end up at System 13 regardless.