Possibly you might be able to import your slide shows into something like SlideShare which would open things up even wider than just on your site. If you want to use the full version of WordPress on a hosted site, there are a ton of options including slideshow, gallery, and other features that would work for you. Without knowing more, I and others can’t help you. Luckily, you have five months or so to play around and run test drives before you have to move off of Windows Live Spaces.

This is all not rushed. Live Spaces announced publicly six months prior to the closing of their service. I’d say that was more than most companies offer. The fact that people are rushing to move also says something about the bigger picture. Yes, there are complainers, as there are for any such move. It’s foreign, new, and a change from how “things have been done” but no one is forcing Live Spaces people to move now, fast, or only to WordPress.com. They just worked with WordPress.com to make the move easier for their members and the WordPress.com team is working overtime to accommodate the new members and meet their needs.

The original 12 million bloggers on Live Spaces was a bloated number. It’s a small percentage of that number and a lot of those blogs are dead and users not interested in making changes. Those that are, many are very satisfied with WordPress.com and enjoying the more diverse culture and options available for their needs. Others are making the long, past due decision to move to their own self-hosted blogs, many of them on WordPress. I’ve also talked to some who’ve moved their content over to WordPress.com, but their social and images to Flickr and Facebook, just changing their playgrounds around. No rules on what you can do for yourself. It’s your stuff. Put it where it works for you.

Again, good luck with your option.

Just curious

In Spaces I had a private blog, it was readable only by my friends and family (my MSN contacts). They would be able to access and read the blog if they where logged in to live.com with their Live ID. There was no restriction as to how many MSN contacts I could have, and thus no restriction on how many readers my blog could have.

In wordpress my migrated blog was automatically set to private, that’s good, but noone could read it. Why? Because it is not possible to authenticate with Live ID. What should have been in place was live ID authentication, and all my MSN contacts should have been added as readers of my new private wordpress blog. It turns out that in order for me to add my friends to read private blog on wordpress they all need to create wordpress accounts. It is not desirable to force all my friends and family to create wordpress accounts for the sole purpose of reading a blog. And to top that of, there is a maximum limit of 35 users on a private blog, if you want more than that you have to pay yearly fees.

The opensource version of wordpress even has a plugin to enable Live ID user authentication, with that in mind it’s unbelievable that Microsoft didn’t make wordpress implement this in the .com version before forcing all their users to wordpress. So private bloggers in spaces has really been hung out to dry with this move unfortunately.

So, I was looking around what to do, and I decided to move to Blogger, simple reason is that in Blogger you can have a private blog where you add user with Google Account. How many of my firends and family already has a Google Account? Almost everyone. How many of my friends has wordpress accounts? Almost noone. Also Blogger gives you 100 private blog readers, almost 3 times what wordpress offers, and I do find Blogger to be extremely customizable, it also supports lists, which is one feature that many of the old space users are missing.

After completing the migration process from spaces to blogger, I decided to share my work with the rest of the community.

If you go to livehelp spaces forum you will see that very many people are very unhappy with this move, and very many people are experiencing technical difficulty moving to wordpress, and for some countries, i.e. China, it’s not even possible to move to wordpress, and no alternative has at this point been given by Microsoft.

This does in every way feel very much like a rushed, not even half tested, and definitely not thought through move by Microsoft. I’m sure some people will find wordpress is a nice alternative for them, but it is not for everyone.