Data Circle

WordPress.com Open via Photo Matt

If you’ve ever wanted a quick and easy way to set up a blog with a relatively catchy URL, no advertisements (at the moment anyway, though I don’t know how long that’s going to be the case) and a fair simple user interface, then WordPress.com is probably the best place to go. You used to need an invite to get an account – I managed to get pwaring.wordpress.com fairly early on – but now sign ups are available to everyone, though personally I expect them to close at some point once the demand for accounts becomes too much.

Having said that, WordPress is ridiculously easy to set up on your own server, as all you need to know are the database connection details. I run several sites powered by WP and it takes me no more than fifteen minutes to set up each one, and that includes creating a new database user for each site (yes I’m paranoid like that), plus tweaking a few configuration options and installing the themes that I like to use. So if you’ve got your own server, even a shared one, you might want to try installing the code yourself in order to get more flexibility and a better URL than myname.wordpress.com, but for beginners just starting out in blogging WordPress.com is great news.