A couple of weeks ago Canary Beck invited me over to her top secret hideout to discuss top secret virtual world blogger plans for world domination. I can’t reveal the minutes of our meeting but I can reveal one piece of advice Canary gave me with regards to those who self host WordPress instead of having their blog hosted by WordPress.
Canary told me to get Jetpack. Having got over my initial disappointment that this wasn’t an update to the 80’s classic computer game, Jet Pac, I decided to take a closer look at this wordpress plugin :
Jetpack adds powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users including customization, traffic, mobile, content, and performance tools.
In short this plugin allows people to enjoy a lot of the features that WordPress.com users enjoy, in particular social sharing, publicising, likes and more.
The install was easy, you just search for Jetpack under plugins and away it goes. Then you need to link your self hosted blog to a WordPress.com account. Fortunately I already had one of these accounts anyway, so it was just a matter of logging in and then the Jetpack configuration features appeared on my Dashboard.
Now there are issues, when we self host WordPress we get extra ways to piddle about with themes, so even though you’ve enabled some of the options, they may now work as well as you hoped they would.
Another issue is that your blog is now linked to WordPress.com, so some of the tools may pause before appearing as the sites need to talk to each other. These are small hurdles to overcome.
If you are self hosting WordPress, then Jetpack is well worth a look.
When you self host be sure you have a backup of the site (meaning copies of the WP folders & database).
Adding plugins, like Jetpack, can break a site. It has been some time since Jetpack caused me any problems. But, I have had to restore my site a couple of times because plugins created problems.
Good advice.