Some 'Alternatives' for WordPress Hosting

1.
Get WordPress hosting for free on a subdomain of Host My Page. It's in Dutch, so you might need to use Google Translate to find your way around.

Or pay €48/year and get a site with your own domain and a CDN

2.
ThisIsTap offers a free WordPress site on a subdomain.

Or pay $5.00/month and get a free, private SSL thrown in.

Foundation Framework - WordPress

I read an article in WP Tavern on WordPress themes based on the Foundation Framework. The article is from November 2013 and I followed a link through to the Swiss theme maker for one of the themes and I saw a notice on the home page that said 'We discontinue development of the required+ Foundation theme – here is why.'

tl;dr; We switched to _s and a custom grid system and therefore don’t use Zurb Foundation anymore. The docs will stay available until 2015, feel free to fork the project on Github. It’s been quite the journey and we learned a lot maintaining the required+ Foundation theme and it’s assets. We are grateful for all the people helping and using required+ Foundation as their WordPress base theme. Instead of releasing a version that we don’t use internally, we finally decided to discontinue required+ Foundation. This decision wasn’t easy and we tried to free some time for the project, but had to realise that it’s best to discontinue the project instead of letting you wait in limbo any longer. Thanks again for the support and understanding – Silvan & the required+ team

One of the commenters asked "I am curious as to why you switched to _s and a custom grid. What was not working for you with Foundation?" and the reply was "We ended up kicking out more and more styles and javascripts shipped with Foundation for most of our WP projects. _s gives us the the headstart needed and is now available as a SASS version too." ______________ In a free world, that is always the risk - that something the appears to be a good foundation upon which to build will peter out and be left siting on a disused track overgrown with weeds.

Offline Editors and Bloated Code

I did an experiment today comparing a couple of offline editors, specifically for whether they introduced additional code into the posts. I wrote it up here with examples of the code. What I don't know is how much additional load the extra code introduces. Is it small compared to other things that add to the overhead of a site? How would one go about testing it?

I Decided To Spring $9.00 For Clutterless Wordpress Theme

I had a spare domain sitting there and I thought, why not? It looks clean and it might be fun.

So I got the Premium version - which gives a couple of features over and above the free version:

Responsive Design The template adapts perfectly to fit mobile devices
Theme Customizer Change template color easy, no coding needed, see screenshot
Theme Support Friendly personal email support

Static site to Wordpress CMS How-To from @CyberCoder

From www.cybercoded.net

Converting older static html sites to WordPress is one of the most popular things for me to work on. Seems there are still a lot of older sites that have no CMS system and when people decide to finally convert these sites WordPress is one of the most popular options.

I used my holiday time to convert one of my own static sites. I wanted to use it as a case study in procedure and time. The site I converted was my Scripts and Database site, CyberCoded.com. This is one of my older sites and I have been too busy to convert it so I continued to manually add pages as needed.

I have about 10 hours invested in the whole process to convert this site. The bulk of the time is in the custom coding of a WordPress Theme from scratch to match an older site. There were 12 pages when I started and as some of the pages had different extensions I decided to convert the site using my favorite WordPress permalink structure and then redirect the old pages.

I used my Blank WordPress Theme so that I could start with a clean slate and match the design to the old site. Read more at www.cybercoded.net

Move from Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org

No SEO hit with the upgrade - it costs $12.00 per year to take up the option.

From en.blog.wordpress.com

Hello, Goodbye: Offsite Redirect Upgrade

Needless to say, we hope you never want to leave WordPress.com. But, should the day arrive that you decide to strike out on your own and set up a self-hosted WordPress blog with the free, open source WordPress software available at WordPress.org, we’ve got you covered with our new Offsite Redirect upgrade.

Imagine you’ve decided to make the move, have exported your content from your wordpress.com blog and imported it into your new self-hosted WordPress site. Purchasing the Offsite Redirect upgrade will take the traffic coming to your old wordpress.com blog and forward it to your new domain so that links to your old content won’t break and you won’t take an SEO hit as a result of your move. Oh, and unlike the old domain mapping/DNS workaround, the signup process is easy as pie. Mmm, pie. Read more at en.blog.wordpress.com