The astute among you may have noticed over the last day that my blog managed to disappear for a bit and then this morning magically reappeared – with a new, more spartan look and some default messiness.

For the last year-plus, my blog has been on WordPress.com, where I help people every day with their blogs. I loved it and if you are thinking of starting a blog or you want to take a lot of the hassle out of managing the blog, I suggest you consider doing so there. I’m proud to work on the service and it really does take a lot of the managing out of the picture so you can get down to business.

But I realized that I had become out-of-touch with a few things, like the state of core development as a whole, how plugins like Jetpack and others function (Jetpack is especially important because I support it), and just hacking a bit on WordPress here and there.

So over the last day, I leased new hosting, checked out trunk, and moved my domain. Now I’m looking forward to exploring a bit more and having some fun with it—starting with making changes to Twenty Twelve.

One thing I’ve fallen behind on is plugins. I’ve grabbed a few and have installed some basics, but I think there are likely a few things that I’m missing. Are there any plugins that—especially recently—you think are key to a good personal WordPress installation? Drop a comment below and let me know what you think.

And I’m not leaving WordPress.com behind by any means; I still have a photoblog that I plan on keeping there, and my wife is still doing her blogging on WordPress.com as well. I already miss several features of WordPress.com that I hope make it to Jetpack in the near future.

Back to adventuring. :)