During 20010 I've written two books and co-authored a third work (sorry but two of these are still under wraps). Busy old year and as always at the end of it I have to ask myself: what did I do to lighten the load?

We always ask ourselves what we can do to make writing easier. It's the wrong question. The right one is: how do we make it less hard? Let me try to list a few of the things that fit that category for me this year in a few separate posts...<!--more--><a href="http://Wordpress.com." target="_blank">Wordpress.com.</a> Yes, the place you're reading this. Authors have to have websites. Mine's been running under the davidhewson.com banner since 1998 or so. There are two problems with author websites. We don't really know that they're for. And like all websites they're a pain to manage, demanding design, administration and technical skills most of us don't own. Especially since we're now blogging too.

After trying a multitude of solutions this year I finally moved to Wordpress.com. I'd been running Wordpress software on a third party host for some time. But Wordpress.com makes your life <em>so</em> much easier. No horrible C panels or technical issues to put up with. You create your site from templates. You point your domain name at it. You're done.

One of WP's great strengths is its limitations. You can't run plugins. You can't install fancy add-ons from other sites. This restricts what you can achieve but it means the damned thing doesn't keep crashing all the time.

So I decided to run with the limitations and see how well I could do within them. This is the site you see. It's not perfect but for a self-run site by an author I don't think it's too bad. There are a lot of books and projects to list for one thing. And WP does keep improving at a rapid rate, so I look forward to seeing what else we can bring on board during 2011.

<em>Benefits:</em> cheaper than third party hosting, a huge time-saver, and scarcely any downtime at all.

<em>Drawbacks:</em> I can't run a proper events diary. But I am trying to cut down on events anyway, so that's not too big a problem.