I took the time today and moved my blog from a self-hosted WordPress Installation to WordPress.com.  I did this for mainly two reasons:

1. I was tired of keeping up with the constant WP upgrades.  It seems like everything I get around to installing on update, I would have to upgrade a few days later.
2. The service I was hosting my blog on, Media Temple’s Grid Service, seemed horribly slow, especially when it came to the administration screens.  My blog is also the only think I’m really running on Media Temple (gs), so if I could move my blog I can eventually reclaim that $20/month.

I’ve been holding off on moving because of the lack of Skribit support on WordPress.com.  However, our most recent Skribit update now provides a comprehensive set of RSS feeds that are available for use with the RSS sidebar widget provided by WP.com.  We’ve also made a change so that bloggers can add their blog without having to add the Skribit widget on their blog, so link to my Skribit blog profile page.

Moving to WP.com wasn’t exactly a seamless process, for a couple of reasons:

• I needed to buy credits to map my domain to WP.com, but the buy credits button wasn’t available until you point your DNS server to WP.com.  This didn’t sit well me, since there could be potential downtime between the time I point my server over to WP.com and when the credits become available for me to use.  It was even more disconcerting to read that credits might not show up for use immediately after purchase.  Fortunately, I was able to find another place on the site to purchase credits (on the page allowing you to gift credits), and the credits did showed up immediately after purchase.
• There’s no apparent way to import uploads from your old server, so I had to mainly upload them.  Fortunately, I’m not exactly a prolific blogger.
• I used the old Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin before WP had tagging functionality built-in, so I lost the tags for all my older posts.
• I haven’t been able to figure out how to import my Intense Debate comments into my new blog (if anyone else have done this before on a WP.com blog, I’d love some pointers).
• WP.com doesn’t have any FeedBurner support, so although I’m using the FeedBurner RSS link on the sidebar, I still have no control over the auto-discovery link that’s in the page header.  I imagine I can fix this if I upgrade my WP.com service though.

I’m not sure how all my changes will affect the RSS feeds, so I apologize for any feed spam.  And there’s still some more images to upload, and I still have to change my header image.

I was lucky in enough to get invited into the closed Intense Debate a few weeks ago, and after a stumble here and there I was able to get the ID plugin installed and working on this blog. Now all new comments be going to be handled by Intense Debate instead of WordPress.

In case you don’t know what Intense Debate is, it’s a blog comment service that can hook into MovableType, WordPress, and Blogger. It enhances the old comment system by adding things like threaded conversations, reputations, and avatars, but also allows me to keep track of my comments and my friends comments — provided that they are commenting on blogs that use the Intense Debate comment system. Checkout my Intense Debate profile page to get a sense of what ID can do.

Please give the plugin a test drive — post a comment and tell me what you think.