Apologies for those of you who have tried to visit Citysifting in the past 24 hours. I’m in the process of moving the blog from Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org. Why? Here’s an excerpt from Michael Martine’s blog, for those of you Wordpress-dot-commers who are considering the switch:

When you have a blog hosted on WordPress.com, they take care of a lot of technical stuff for you. You never have to mess with installations or upgrades. You don’t have to create databases. You never have to deal with domains (unless you want to). All you have to do is create your blog, pick a theme (the look or design of your blog, sometimes called a template), and start posting.

Nothing could be better? Right?

Except that…

• Soon or later, you find out that out of all five billion themes available, you don’t really like any of them, but you have little to no say (or skill) in customizing all but a very few of them.
• Sooner or later, you find out that you can’t put AdSense or any kind of web widget on your blog that runs on the JavaScript language.
• Sooner or later, you discover that all the cool functionality other blogs have from something called plugins is verboten to you on WordPress.com.

Plus, having the blog separate from your main site messes up search results because you’re sending people to two different places. It sorta weakens your search strength.

Lastly, the blog is simply out of your control. Other people could decide to try and get your blog banned, or WordPress.com might make some decision in the future that you will not be happy with, and then what would you do?

When you switch to Wordpress.org, Wordpress will not host your site for free. I’ve paid HostICan $80 to host the blog for the next year, so we’ll see how this goes. I’m not sure exactly how creative I’ll get with the design, but it will soon look better than this.

Now I’m off to the Dirksen Senate building to pick up our inauguration tickets!!!