I am pretty far along in my research on moving to a self hosted WordPress environment. I believe this will give me more of the flexibility i am looking for in terms of capability without having to also do a bunch of graphic design.
I just got off the phone with godaddy to switch my free hosting account associated with www.bone-of-contention.com from Windows to Linux. (It helps to do your research before you go screwing around with your domain settings. I did not check the requirements before i set-up the account. Oops.) That change will be completed in 24-48 hours.
The free hosting accounts at godaddy do have slightly annoying banners at the top hocking their products. But i believe and hope that it will be tolerable for me and for you for a month or so to allow time to experiment and see if self hosting does what i hope it will do.
If the experiment works, i will happily beg you all for money shell out the dough for a paid account with no banners.
There is still nothing new for you guys to do. The biggest question i have now is whether or not the blog can exist in two places at once (here at the free hosted site and over at the godaddy self hosted site). I hope that it can. I would not expect those to be integrated in any way so that updating one updates both, but it would be nice to be able to have this area stay nice and clean and ad free and “predictable” while i experiment at the new site.
Anyway, time will tell, more will be revealed. I believe there is some feeedburner research to finish in my future. I will let you know here before anything changes…