When I first heard about WordPress I assumed that it was one entity and similar to Blogger or Typepad.

You pick from your prescribed themes and off you go. This is true for WordPress.com. At WordPress.com your blog is hosted on the WordPress.com site so effectively you have the benefit of the masses of traffic that goes to the site, it is extremely quick to set up but you don’t get your own domain name, and you are not building your own business asset.

Then it transpired that the place to go is WordPress.org where you can sign up for a blog under your own domain name. So off I went, did it all, and have got juicy statistics about 2 weeks later of 13,000 hits. If I had been on the .com site they would all have gone to the greater WordPress site not to my domain specifically.

Having got the .com / .org division clear in my mind at last I was completely bemused by the instruction to get an API key from WordPress.com. Not being naturally technical I felt rather exhausted by the whole thing and procrastinated. I had separated the two WordPress sites and couldn’t put them back together again. I thought I was going to be forcefully swept into some blog vault from which I would never appear… and my blog would be torn apart by ravening wolves.

I so completely didn’t trust the instruction that I put a comment on twitter and asked for help but none appeared. So a week later I decided to believe the instruction and obey it. I have just been over to WordPress.com, filled out the profile and signed up, and now am the proud owner of an API key.

Wordpress.com - get the key

The point of the API key is to help remove spam from your blog. I am glad to say I have had no spam yet, but know that the client blogs I work on get a lot. So spammers I am ready for you. Bring it on. Let’s test this API key – and make sure it is worth it!