Happy Thanksgiving, WordPress! (a letter to Matt Mullenweg)

Happy Thanksgiving, WordPress!
from Brian Simpson, daddy blogger

Dear Matt,

This Thanksgiving as I reflect on the things for which I am thankful, I have to send you a BIG thanks for getting me started blogging … for free.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote my very first blog post. I had no clue what I was doing. All I had was a vision and a newly discovered interest in all things social media. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I stumbled onto the www.WordPress.com website. I set up an account and hit the ground running, as I learned about how this platform could serve as a creative outlet for me.

This summer, I attended WordCampRDU and listened to your keynote address at the conference. How inspiring to see someone as young as you succeed in business so rapidly! Your speech inspired me in many ways, from the way that I approached blogging to the way I approached public speaking from that point forward (your conversational public speaking style was both engaging and impressive).

I had a ton of fun blogging with my free WordPress.com account for the past 11 months. Tonight, I finally decided to let it go.

For a while, my daddy blog (Raleigh Daddy 3.0) has lived here at www.raleighdaddyblog.com/blog but I left my old site up and running at raleighdaddy.wordpress.com. I added a few blog posts alerting people to the move, and I created a custom header advertising the new URL. A slow but steady stream of traffic continued to go to my old site, and my analytics showed that a good number of the people who found that site via Google never came over to this site which has all my new posts.

It was tough, but tonight I hit the DELETE button. Raleighdaddy.wordpress.com is now extinct, except in my fond memories.

So I just want to say thank you for creating WordPress and for offering it to the public for free. I learned a lot with it, and now I’m having a blast figuring out how much MORE is possible with my new and improved “self-hosted” WordPress site.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

Brian

 

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