Blogging | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 310: Taking the Self-Hosted WordPress Plunge

When I started this blog 30 months ago, my goal was to get hands-on experience with blogging. I was going to be responsible for our new media/social media initiatives at Mayo Clinic, and it seemed reasonable that I should dive in and become familiar with the tools and what they can do, so I could recommend the best way to apply them in my work.

Here were the criteria I set for myself in choosing a blogging platform:

It had to be easy. I needed to be able to set it up myself, without any help from our IT department. This was for my personal learning and enrichment, so I wasn’t about to ask IT to help. Not that they would have (or should have) even if I had asked. They’re great people, but they have other priorities, like managing the medical and billing records for over a million patients a year, and all of the other administrative data required for an organization with 50,000 employees. The three major platforms I examined — Blogger, TypePad and WordPress — all met that standard.
Free had to be an option. I also was really cheap. I didn’t want to have to spend anything out of pocket to learn about blogging. That kicked Typepad out of consideration, because its minimum was $4.95 a month. Did I mention that I’m really cheap?
A self-hosting upgrade option was desirable. I wanted to explore a platform that would allow me to grow, and that could be used for intranet blogs, too, so that we could get accustomed to a common interface. That meant wordpress.com was edging ahead, because Blogger is a strictly Internet solution. I wanted to have an upgrade path that could include domain mapping, and that would let me eventually move to a hosting service (for more control) without breaking links and losing Google juice.
The Robert Scoble Tiebreaker. It wasn’t really a tie: as indicated by the factors above, I was leaning toward WordPress.com. But I figured if that service was good enough for someone as savvy as Scoble, it could meet my needs. That settled it.

I have been extremely happy with my decision, and my blogging on wordpress.com has been fun, rewarding and cheap. For the most part, anything you see on this blog is something you could do without IT support and at no cost. I believe that to this point my total investment, including domain mapping and additional storage upgrades and a domain name from GoDaddy.com, has been about $30. And I have helped several people start blogs for which they have yet to spend a cent.

The WordPress.com service has been great, and they continually add more value, such as the 3 GB of free storage. I have absolutely no complaints.

But now, it’s time to take the next step and move to a self hosted solution. My main reasons:

I want to explore custom plug-ins and widgets. WordPress.com strips out javascript because they don’t want one bit of malicious code on one blog to potentially affect millions of blogs. But that means I can’t embed many videos on my wp.com blogs, except for those that are on YouTube. Thankfully, YouTube is the biggest source of Web video, and wp.com does support it. But I know there are other high-quality YouTube players that will look better, and other potential sources of Web video. And that’s just a start. The plug-ins and widgets are my main reason for the move.
I want better statistics. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can’t install Google Analytics, because WordPress.com has it already installed. You get some helpful free statistics from your dashboard with wp.com’s Blog Stats, but nothing as extensive as Google Analytics.
I figure Google ad revenue will at least match my server costs. With wordpress.com you can’t run Google or other ads (and as Scoble says, what do you expect when you are getting a ton of value for free?) WordPress.com runs some Google ads to fund its free services. I would expect that if I run Google ads I can do likewise.
I want to make my blogging easier. I’ve been illustrating workarounds that enable people to overcome WordPress.com’s limits by thinking creatively. For example, I found this information on how to put social bookmarking buttons on wordpress.com blog posts, but it takes a couple of minutes for each post. At some point the workarounds become too much work. I think that after 669 posts I’ve shown that I’m going to stick with this blogging thing. It would be a lot easier to just install the ShareThis widget and save time with each future post.
It’s the Burden of a Chancellor to explore new frontiers. If I’m going to do 300-level courses in the Blogging curriculum, I need to be able to demonstrate some of the advanced functionality of the full-powered WordPress software. And I chose wordpress.com (and implemented domain mapping about a year ago) because it should make this migration fairly easy (at least as compared to Steve Rubel’s experience trying to move from Typepad to WordPress.) So now it’s time to prove it.
It’s preparing for some other possible migrations. I started this blog to get hands-on experience with blogging, and have applied what I’ve learned in my work. We have several Mayo Clinic blogs now hosted on WordPress.com that we may want to enhance similarly by moving to a self-hosted solution. If there are any hiccups in the migration process, I want them to happen on my personal blog, not a work-related one.

I did a Google search for some related “how to” posts on making the move, and found a few resources that may be somewhat helpful. Here’s
an overview of the process. This one has a PDF that seems like its step-by-step instructions may be really helpful, with this related post.

My case may be a little more complicated, though. I already have leeaase.wordpress.com mapped to social-media-university-global.org. So I’m not sure how I can have a blog hosted at that same domain name on another hosting service without having some periods of broken links. Maybe it won’t be a big deal (this post makes it seem relatively simple), but for now at least it’s an unknown to me. Which means it’s a learning opportunity.

Another helpful post I found was this one which tells how to install WordPress on a Macintosh using MAMP. This will let me export my blog from wordpress.com and import it on my laptop. Once I get that part figured out, it should make it much faster when I do the switch for real with a Web hosting service.

This also seems a good time to move because the holidays (and weekends) are slow periods for blog traffic. So if I have any glitches or 404 – Not Found errors while I’m making the switch, they would be minimized if I can get the migration completed by Monday.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for recommendations on a Web hosting service. I purchased my domain name (social-media-university-global.org) from GoDaddy. Would it make the most sense to use GoDaddy for my hosting? I’ve also had recommendations for bluehost.com, enginehosting.com, liquidweb.com, mediatemple.net and ANhosting. All other things being equal, I’ll probably go for the low-cost option (remember what I said about being really cheap?)

But if you have feedback to share about this migration process in general (or hosting services in particular), I would love to hear from you. If you have either raves or rants to share, I would appreciate the guidance.

After I’ve first migrated successfully to my laptop, I will pick one of those services and make the move. And I’ll document the process along the way to make it easier for other SMUGgles when you’re ready to give it a shot.

RAQ: Can I keep my username from showing on a WordPress.com blog post?

SMUGgle Pam Larson, who is starting a new blog as one of her projects for 2009 (and who also lives across the street from Old Main), sent me a text message this morning with the following question:

If I don’t want my user name to show up under each post, can I delete that line? I can’t find that option.

As I see it, there are three potential ways to accomplish this. The first is easy. The other two aren’t. And this points to a new phase of learning I’m beginning as your Chancellor.

Solution #1: Pick a different theme

I was surprised when I helped my parents start a blog with some of their locally politically active friends, that when they wrote some posts the usernames weren’t published. They had picked the “Cutline” theme by Chris Pearson from among the free choices on WordPress.com.

So switching themes would be the quickest and easiest way to accomplish this goal. But Pam likes her current theme, so it doesn’t solve her problem.

Solution #2: Edit CSS

This is a paid upgrade option on WordPress.com that lets you tailor the look of your blog. It costs $15 a year. The best part is you can experiment with CSS and learn how to use it, and preview the changes, before you have to pay. Then, when you pay for the upgrade, your changes become visible to the world.

You need to know about CSS to use this productively, but the good news is that WordPress.com has a CSS customization forum where you can learn. I think I’ll spend some time playing with this.

But because editing CSS doesn’t allow you to edit the underlying theme, I have a feeling this still won’t solve Pam’s problem, unless she were to switch to the Sandbox theme and try to rebuild her blog’s look from scratch. I won’t really know that until after I’ve played with CSS for a while.

Solution #3: Self-Hosted Blog

This is the most complicated option, but it gives you the most control over the final look and feel of your blog. It also requires that you rent server space and install the free WordPress software on it (from WordPress.org.) As the next step in my social media learning (and to help me write some 300-level courses), I’m planning to move SMUG a self-hosted platform in 2009. More on that in a future post.

Conclusion:

It doesn’t appear that there is an easy answer for Pam’s question, that would let her keep the look she likes. Option 1 gets rid of the username but by changing the theme, Option 2 probably doesn’t solve the problem (and requires substantial work) and Option 3 could definitely work, but would cost more and take more work.

If any other SMUGgles have a better solution, please chime in and let us all learn from you!

Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets

In response to this post about how you can put a “Follow Me” Twitter badge on your WordPress.com blog, budgallant says:

that’s interesting, but definitely not at alternative to actually displaying the twitter updates…. what is up with wordpress? do they have a bias against twitter?

It’s not an anti-Twitter thing; it’s about WordPress.com stripping any javascript that you attempt to paste into one of its widgets. They say it’s a security measure, and I’ll take them at their word. I suppose if you have several million blogs on one server domain, you don’t want one with malicious code to bring the whole platform down. So the easy way out is to not allow anything but straight HTML in sidebar widgets.

Thankfully, there is a way around the problem, that lets you both have a badge people can click to follow you, and also display your latest Tweets.

You do the first part by following the instructions I had in the previous post.

Putting the latest Tweets in is actually easier, because Twitter provides an RSS feed that you can pull into an RSS widget in WordPress.com.

Continue reading “Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets”

Avoiding Social Media Indecision

SMUGgle Maddie Grant, the formerly reluctant blogger, makes a good point when she (after her obligatory allusion to my awesomeness) says I made her want to tear her hair out with the Social Media 110 course.

She’s absolutely right: you don’t need seven ways to shrink your URLs. It only takes one. Pick one that works for you and use it. Social Media 110 probably should have been a 200-level course; as you’re starting with social media, it’s not essential that you understand all the different ways you can shrink your URLs.

This reminds me of a story, which I believe was in Made to Stick, about a study of college students and their choices. When given a choice between studying and going to a movie, something like 30 percent chose studying. But if the choice was between studying, the movie and another event (some kind of interesting lecture or presentation), the number of people who chose to study actually increased. More choices made it harder for the students to decide which of the fun things to do, so they were more likely to default to studying.

I hope giving you seven ways to shrink URLs doesn’t likewise create indecision for you, or overwhelm you with options. You surely don’t need to try them all. I like SnipURL because it has a browser bookmarklet that makes posting items to Twitter really easy. So if you’re looking for a recommendation, that would probably be mine.

But any of these services are fine. The main point is to just start using one of them.

That’s also another reason why I do all my posts about blogging with reference to the WordPress platform. Blogger and Typepad are fine, and if you like them, use them. I had visiting professors review them as part of the blogging curriculum.

But my main goal with SMUG is to help people get engaged in social media, using state-of-the-art tools, so I just picked the one blogging platfrom I think is best and most powerful. And I want to be able to go deeper with one platform, instead of saying “This is how you do it on WordPress, but you can do the same thing on Blogger by… and on TypePad by….” I just don’t have the time or inclination to do the same thing three different ways. And I surely won’t be shrinking my URLs seven different ways.

Choosing your blogging platform is a lot more consequential than deciding which URL shrinker to employ, because you could change the latter every day (not that you should) without really affecting anything, but it’s harder to make a switch once you’ve decided on a platform for your blog.

Meanwhile, Maddie’s post gives me further impetus to provide some recommendations on a few steps everyone should be taking — sort of an updated, “new-and-improved for 2009” version of Social Media 101. Instead of 12 steps I will probably have five or six that I would call “must-dos.”

In doing so, I hope to help you avoid the indecision that leads to procrastination, and give you concrete steps that will be fruitful for you personally and professionally.

It’s a balancing act in which the inclination toward research as befits a global university (and one that is nearing the one-year anniversary of its formal establishment!) is in tension with the desire to make things straightforward and simple for beginning SMUGgles. Thanks to Maddie, I’ll try to be more clear when I’m exploring a range of options as a research project, and that I’m not recommending that everyone go forth and do likewise.

RAQ – Related Posts

In the comments about my post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Peggy Hoffman asks:

Question (and yes great book) can you share with us how-tos on the related post widget you are using here that produces automatically generated material.

It’s really easy. In your WordPress dashboard (and I’m glad I’ve waited until WordPress 2.7 was released before I did my overview of the dashboard for Blogging 111; that’s coming soon), you click on the Appearance link on the left side:

picture-14

And then choose Extras:

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At which point you will see a set of options like this:

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All you need to do is make sure the last option, “Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other blogs or get traffic that way” is unchecked.

So, on WordPress.com, having the automatically related links is the default option, I believe. You can decide you don’t want to have it, but as Peggy points out, it can be really helpful to your readers.

They are automatically generated, so they aren’t guaranteed to be related, but on balance I think this is a good option. I’m sure some SMUGgles found their way to our University originally because of a possibly related link on someone else’s WordPress.com blog.

If that’s your story, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please let us know if the automatically related links helped you discover SMUG. That will help our fellow SMUGgles see the value of this feature as well.

While I was doing this post I saw another feature that has no useful point, but I’m turning it on just for effect. Let me know what you think of the falling snow. Only available on WordPress.com, and only until 1/4/09.