I am on my way from leaving Blogger.com for a self-hosted “MultiSite” WordPress set-up. I have my doubts with both of them. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Time to sit down and recap.
I have been using Google’s Blogger.com to run a couple of blogs for a couple of years now, more or less just for “social bookmarking“. I was quite happy with it.
Google has been dropping quite a few services through the last couple of years, the one of them, that hurt me most, was Google Reader. That was quite a loss.
Google experiments with competing services like Blogger.com and Google+. It is not unlikely and actually rather expected, that sooner or later Google will stop servicing Blogger.com. Google+ is not quite, what I am after, see my requirements listed below.
I made negative experiences with Blogger.com, and I would rather avoid them with my future set-up. A couple of years ago and all of a sudden, one of the blogs I ran with Blogger.com got removed by them with immediate notice. No chance to archive my old articles, no chance to complain, strange and nebulous allegations, not concrete at all, to opportunity to answer back and protest.
What are my requirements for my new blogging service?
- articles in different languages go to separate blogs; I find it rather unbearable to filter out articles, that I cannot understand (e.g. and especially because of their language), and I do not expect “my readers” to bear with this kind of strange language-mix picture; I think WordPress’s MultiSite feature is good for that
- I like categorisation and so forth (WordPress’s Categories and Tags, Blogger.com’s Lables)
- I like to be able to deal with the same text in both WYSIWIG and mark-up style
- …
How to proceed:
- http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
- download the WordPress .tar.gz or .zip
- unpack the tar.gz into subdirectory wp, not “wordpress”, as you will have to live with the subdirectory, that you decide here
- add the line mentioning WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE as descibed within “Create A Network”
- visit your …/wp/readme.html in a browser
- do as described there!
- sub-domains were not an option, sub-directories got suggested, and I rather like that
- …
Downsides:
- no “nice names” for my blog articles within the RSS feed yet
- …
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