Now that I have finally finished moving all my old archives from Blogger to WordPress by hand, I find that there was an easier way. Sort of.

Yesterday I found that to activate the Akismet spam-blocker you need something called a WordPress API key, which you get by opening a free account a WordPress.com. I did that, and while I was doing it I had a look around WordPress.com.

The last time I looked was shortly after the service started, when Jo referred me to it, and it seems to have moved on a bit since then. Or maybe I didn’t know what to look for before. The customisation options seem to be greater than they were before, and there is an import function which will import old posts and comments from Blogger.

Anyone thinking about moving to WordPress, should have a look at this. It saves you the trouble of finding (and paying for) your own host, has the same look and feel as WordPress and most of the same facilities.

You can’t install plugins or any template you want, but there is now a range of different templates – 32 of them – to choose from, and you can edit the sidebar in a fairly simplified way by dragging widgets to it. So it is limited, but still pretty bloody good.

The biggest problem I can see is that if you move to WordPress.com and import all your posts, and then later decide to get the extra 20% of functions by running on your own host there is not an obvious way to export from it. (Just as well really, because if there was I would be kicking myself having moved about 600 posts by hand, discarding all the comments in the process)

Running a version yourself does involve a small cost, in return you can get a more personalised domain name, the ability to add extra features via plugins and more scope for customising, but if you can live without that it is worth considering. I might have gone for it myself if someone had not snapped up the “skuds” name back in October – even though they have not used it since.