Why would you?

So, Owen brought up a good point on his blog.

If you have your own site, be it with a host or your own server, why would you want to jump on the bandwagon that is wordpress.com?

For most people, it was the idea of being ‘chosen’ to play with wordpress.com. Since you had to be invited, everyone wanted to be part of the in-crowd. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be one of the chosen few, right? But Owen has good points about the fact that an account at wordpress.com is limited in customization. Really limited. You can’t add plugins, you can’t modify the theme. And the number of themes available to use is also very limited. I know why, but still. It can be frustrating.

I decided to claim my ‘invite’ for the purpose of having an outlet that I would be comfortable showing to my students. The things I place on wp.com are my views of high school life as a teacher. And I do not mind my students coming across that. Were they to find my ‘home’ blog, well, that would be an issue for me. Because everyone wants to feel able to blog about whatever they want on their personal blog. So, I am messing around with the wp.com for that reason. To check out the WPMU without installing it to my own site and to have a place I’d feel comfortable having my students find.

But that’s me. You might wonder why I just didn’t set up a ‘new’ blog at my domain. Well – my students are curious ones and would check out the ‘home’ page of a domain where the ‘teacher’ blog might be a subdomain. Crafty, they are. ::grins::