So far the transition to WordPress.com has gone better than expected. The DNS transfers went very smoothly. WordPress.com and Google both have very good documentation on doing the transfer so that if you know even a little about computers, you can probably make the transition with no problems.
I have also been pleasantly surprised that search links to the site, even though they point to addresses like: http://metzener.com/davemblog/2010/06/08/weblog-kind-of-quiet-here/ when the user clicks on that link in Google or another search engine, WordPress.com figures out what page its supposed to go to and takes the user to the correct URL: http://metzener.com/2010/06/08/weblog-kind-of-quiet-here/.
I was really worried that since the site is hosted at WordPress.com, the fact that my self-hosted site used a subdirectory /davemblog/ that when folks clicked on links, they would be taken to 404 pages. This is great that they are not.
So for a mere $10 a year, you can have WordPress.com host a blog with your domain name and you can even use Google for email. So I have gone from just under $200 a year to just under $10 a year.
There is one drawback to using WordPress.com. They don’t support MarkDown in posts. I have quite a few articles that use MarkDown (links look like this: [Google](http://www.google.com/) ). As I find those posts, I’ll go in and correct them so that the links work as they should. If you come across such a link, just select the URL text and past that into a new browser tab for now. I’ll be fixing them shortly.
Dave M.
