An essential WordPress feature that I use on this blog is the ability to format mathematical expressions. At the old home, I was using the plugin Katex. I just noticed that it was only working in Firefox. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how long it had been broken.
WordPress.com’s customer service wasn’t helpful, although they did point out that Katex hadn’t been updated for over a year. I found that the MathJax-LaTeX plugin was being actively maintained. On the old host’s service MathJax was horribly broken. It didn’t support colors, which I used in the previous post, An Expanded Multiplication Table. It only supported inline expressions and the background of inline expressions was white which didn’t match the blog’s background.
When I combined those failures with the high cost of the required upgrade at wordpress.com, $25/month, I searched for a new home. I’m glad that I found the problem before the blog renewed in a few weeks at $300 for another year!
When I searched for reviews, this host, IONOS was ranked highly. I already have been using IONOS for hosting my other websites, so I moved the blog there too. It appears that I didn’t lose much in the transition. It took me an afternoon to get the content transferred and an hour or two to get the site reconfigured. Most of that time was spent fixing the color references.
It was easy to find help for MathJax-LaTeX on the Mathematics StackExchange. For example, MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference and that is just scratching the surface of resources.
I wonder why I didn’t make this transition sooner. Spending $12 instead of $300 seems like enough incentive to change, but inertia is a powerful demotivator. My other WordPress blogs can follow.
{{Update: It turns out that the other blogs are stuck because I can’t transfer the media library. However, the financial benefit of transferring them only applies to the first year so the incentive isn’t as strong. It appears that transferring the media library is a difficult problem because its configuration is set by the managed hosting provider. Different hosts might use incompatible file naming schemes. In addition, the two cheaper blogs, blog.wwayneb.com and blog.sesquibits.com only have a limited export tool.}}