Blogging communities like GeeksWithBlogs offer the advantage of a pre-established readership, free hosting, and no hassles when it comes to setting up and maintaining your blog.
Unfortunately, you also give up a lot of control when you become part of a large blogging community and ultimately miss out on the basic joys of tinkering. For the more capitalist minded among you, you also forgo the possibility of ever monetizing your blog.
If you are currently considering migrating your blog to your own domain or getting ready to start your own blog and aren’t sure which direction to go, here are a few things I would recommend based on my recent experience.
Consider Using WordPress – SubText is a fine blogging engine, but I have been won over by the enormous number of plugins and themes available for WordPress. That translates into a lot more functionality as well as a more professional look and feel of your blog. I initially assumed that it would require a lot more technical investment on my part because it runs on PHP and mySQL, but so far I have been able to make a large number of customizations without ever having to refer to a tutorial due to the similarity of PHP and classic ASP as well as the intuitive design and naming conventions used by WordPress.- Choose a Readable Theme – With over 1500 free themes to choose from, it’s easy to get distracted by designs that are flashy but make it difficult to accomplish the primary purpose of a blog, which is to facilitate reading content. Make sure the text is the main focus of your page and that it is in a clear font. Simpler is usually better.
- Expect Issues with Importing Old Blog Posts – Even though SubText provides a nice xml export feature (BlogML), the import process into WordPress was still a little bumpy. I found a plugin to help with the process, but there were still some issues with formatting and category names after the import process.
- Don’t Underestimate the Damage Done by WYSIWYG Editors (i.e. FckEditor) - WordPress lets you change themes effortlessly, but if you have pre-existing posts that were created with a WYSIWYG editor, then the chances are good that the HTML in your old posts is so polluted with inline tags that the CSS stylesheets in your fancy new theme won’t work properly. I’m still in the process of manually cleaning up the HTML from my old posts and it is a mind-numbingly tedious process that I’ll probably give up on before I finish.
- Get Sophisticated with Subscriber Statistics – SubText offers some rudimentary statistics on readers, but I took the opportunity to switch to Feedburner and install plugins for google analytics and WordPress.com Stats. I have been impressed with the level of reporting detail they offer when it comes to analyzing site traffic.
- Widgetize your Blog – What’s the fun of tinkering if you can’t go crazy with the plugins? Some of my favorites so far are Popularity Contest, ShareThis, KG Archives, Twitter Tools, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, and Subscribe To Comments.
- Expect a drop in Subscribers – This is one of the advantages that a blogging community offers, so you can definitely expect to lose a few readers during the transition. In the case of GeeksWithBlogs, it didn’t help that I was removed from the main feed as soon as I put my notice up and had no ability to set up 301 redirects.
- Learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimizations) - If you want to make up for your drop in readership, then you’ll probably want to roll up your sleeves and learn a little about the black art of search engine optimization while setting up your blog. If you use WordPress, start by using these plugins: All in One SEO Pack, Jerome’s Keywords, Head META Description, Enforce
www.Preference, Google Sitemap Generator, and Google Analytics plugin. If you want to get really serious about it, I hear Max from codesqueeze is planning on offering a 2 day advanced course on SEO later this year in exotic Fargo, ND. - Test in multiple browsers/readers – I had to abandon my first theme completely after I realized it looked absolutely horrible in Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, I had already wasted a lot of time trying to customize it. I also forgot to retest my comment section functionality after installing the second theme and thus didn’t find out that it was broken until several days after going live.
- Find a Good FTP Client – the web interfaces supplied by hosting companies will work in a pinch, but you’ll really want a good FTP program. I am totally hooked on SmartFTP, which I discovered after consulting Scott Hanselman’s tool list.
Setting up your own blog is definitely not for everybody. If all you want to do is focus on writing good content and not worry about anything else, then I would recommend sticking with the blogging community site.
However, if you want to learn about all the gooey goodness that goes into making a blogging engine purr, then I would highly recommend the experience of setting up a blog on your own domain. So far I’m glad I did it.
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