Nearly three years ago, I “blasted off” from one of my prior blogs at WordPress.com, embarking on an endeavor to self-host my own website. I had assumed at the time that making my own website meant that I could no longer be linked into the support apparatus and community of WordPress.com.
I seem to have a knack for missing the obvious in all things, and this adventure was no different. I set out on my journey to self-host, deciding at first to completely abandon the WordPress platform altogether and try Ghost. I created my own cloud Ubuntu server (droplet) with Digital Ocean, installed Ghost, migrated all my blog content, and set up my new domain name. After a time, I decided to return to the WordPress ecosystem via a WordPress.org installation, again a self-host. I did another migration. Each migration was very time-intensive.
Throughout all of these migrations, my blog effectively existed alone in a virtual desert, with no integrations to the rest of the Internet outside of a few social media accounts like X, and Google Analytics. The latter was the only saving grace to know I was actually getting real traffic to my blog. No subscribers, no newsletters, no easy way for users and passer-bys to engage and comment.
During this wandering through the digital sands, I discovered that Google likes my technology articles. For example, this article I wrote on a simple fix for the Asus mesh router became my most popular post with nearly 40,000 views and still counting. Since then, I have tried to mix up the blog with a combination of my astronomy and astrophotography content and “how to” articles for niche technology advice.
My content has been sparse for the last several months due to real-world obligations along with a thorough backend cleanup of my website and blog. It was in doing this maintenance I discovered by chance that it is possible to “connect” self-hosted blogs back to WordPress.com via the Jetpack plugin.
If you are reading this, you are probably well-versed in WordPress.com and already knew about Jetpack. I knew “of” Jetpack but never drilled into understanding what it really was and what it can do for your blog, without a paid plan (I always assumed it was a full pay plugin for some reason). Like I said, I miss the obvious. Suddenly I realized that I could integrate my newest and latest blog, ComputerLookingUp.com, with WordPress.com just as if it were hosted on WordPress.com.
The integration took some work, particularly getting xmlrpc to work and still maintain my web server’s security. This will be the topic of my next article, which may be helpful for anyone who wants to self-host and still connect to WordPress.com.
Even better, I learned that it is possible to migrate a WordPress.com blog’s subscriber list to a self-hosted site. And so I moved all of my dormant subscribers from apertureastronomy.wordpress.com over to ComputerLookingUp.com. If you are one of my original subscribers, I want to welcome you back, and hope you don’t mind the move. Same me and essentially the same blog, with a different name.
My hope is that by linking my blog back into the WordPress.com world, I will be able to discover new blogs to follow myself. I have been off the WordPress.com site for a long time, since I spent my blog time maintaining my self-host.
Thank you for reading my article. I do have a backlog of content to post, including updates on the recent Saturn opposition.
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Your integration with WordPress seems to work as far as the blog is concerned, because I received notification of this post.
However, when I commented on your Lenovo post, I do not appear to have received a notification of a response to me.
I had a belated look today and found that you did indeed respond. I will keep a lookout out for any future responses to any comments I make.
Thank you Roger, I appreciate the comments, no pun intended.
I too have noticed the integration is a little wonky. It works, but just might not be 100% seamless presently.
Hi Paul. Just to confirm that an e-mail alert for your comment was not received.
Thanks again Roger. I plan at some point to make a dummy WordPress account to test (commenting and notices to myself appear fine). Appreciate the feedback.