Welcome to “The Hard Sell”

This is the fourth incarnation of my personal blog, and the first hosted on wordpress.com.

I used to write my blog by hand, and it got annoying after a while. I persisted, though. Now, the disadvantages are becoming clear: I can’t do many of the things that bloggers everywhere take for granted, even with the automated Thingamablog solution I used for the previous blog. The most important, for me, was being able to post from places other than my broadband connection.

So I considered a number of options:

• Upgrading to Blueyonder’s higher web tier and installing something – no MySQL, so no MT or WordPress hosted
• Blogger by FTP – can’t FTP to my site from outside the provider’s space, and Blogger’s apparently quite unreliable lately…
• Paying for a hosting provider – bandwidth limits a go-go

Thankfully, I discovered wordpress.com. Sure, I can only use one of their provided styles – and the site might change a bit until I find one I really like – but otherwise, it’s exactly what I needed. It provides easy access from anywhere, it moderates comments, it’s WordPress, it doesn’t force adverts on you and it’s free. So I went straight for it, and I must say I’m liking it more and more.

And the obvious question: what is “the hard sell”? Simply a comment on our society as a whole, something that everyone has been taken in by, me and you included. Also, it’s the title of the perennially redrafted novel I’ve been writing for a very long time. Hope you enjoy the blog.