So I’m using .com for my personal blog, and .org for a website. It’s interesting.

I’m sticking to vanilla plug-ins and widgets. Only one I’m using so far is the “Jetpack” plugin which gives me access to WordPress.com functions. I even use the Twenty Eleven theme, which is about as vanilla as you can get. I get a choice of “light” and “dark” backgrounds. Wouldn’t mind a few more colors, but there it is.

So far it looks pretty good. The web wizards generate their stuff and then “launch” it online when it’s all done. Me, I put WordPress in the server’s root directory so that my stuff goes online in real time, and evolves there. Another challenge: Can you grow a website in front of everyone while having the intermediate stages all be viable? Nothing biological evolution hasn’t been able to handle, right?

I have the advantage of a website primarily designed to plug my book. Shopping links are all external. I don’t need to set up any fancy crap. Peak level of function might be a video or something. I’ve got two pages up, and can easily add more as I go along.

On that assumption, while there may be some special widgets and add-ons developed exclusively by wordpress.com, for the most part–by which I mean by the tens of thousands–there’s a marketplace for add-ons identical in concept to an Apple or Android app store. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

I use that catalog for shopping, but when the time comes to download and try out something, I always do it from inside WordPress, using the Plugins section of the dashboard. You can search the catalog again from inside, to find your pick; and then just tell WordPress to download and install it for you. It’s either smooth and seamless (most of the time) or crashes and burns (occasionally). In the latter case, you’ve learned the most basic fact about a plugin, it’s POS quotient.

You won’t need to touch a single line of code to do this. But it sometimes helps. Very few plugins are created by professionals, and the quality varies as wildly as it ever did in the days of DOS and shareware. Caveat eternium.