Author Archives: mhick255

Moving to WordPress (Dot Com)

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The last couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with some malware on my personal website and a couple of other sites I manage. After spending a Saturday and several evenings cleaning it up, I decided to move my personal website from my self-hosted WordPress set-up — which I’d been running quite happily for many years — to a hosted solution. Merlin Mann’s endorsements for Squarespace on his Back to Work podcast have convinced that, at this point in my life, I care more about creating content than administering code.

After comparing Squarespace, tumblr, and WordPress.com, I decided to move to WordPress.com, for the following couple of reasons:

  • It’s low cost. (At this point, I’m paying only $12/year to map mikehickerson.com to my WordPress.com site.)
  • Migrating from WordPress.org to WordPress.com was very simple.
  • Unlike tumblr (which I like a lot for sharing links, photos, videos, etc.), I can create and manage a full website, with pages, subpages, menus, etc.
  • A big plus: I could take my existing site design (which is based on WordPress’s default Twenty Eleven theme) and more-or-less transfer it to WordPress.com. Since I tend to obsess over design decisions, it was important that I could do something quickly with having to make new choices.

I’m not exactly sure how my permalinks linked from Facebook or other sites will transfer, but that’s a kink I can work out later.

Link

The Age of Anxiety by W. H. Auden, edited by Alan Jacobs

I started reading the new critical edition of Auden’s the Age of Anxiety yesterday. Or, rather, I started reading Jacobs’ foreword to the poem. So far, I am very impressed. Auden was about my current age when he began writing The Age of Anxiety (something which, in itself, seems impossible), and so far it’s eery how many of my own concerns and anxieties are addressed in the poem.