Category: blogging

With Blogger.com I had these blog names:

• blog-en.jochen.hayek.name
• blog-de.jochen.hayek.name

With my self-hosted WordPress set-up I have these blog names

• Jochen.Hayek.name/wp/blog-en resp.
  Hayek.name/Jochen/wp/blog-en resp.
  www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/Hayek/Jochen/wp/blog-en
• Jochen.Hayek.name/wp/blog-de resp.
  Hayek.name/Jochen/wp/blog-de resp.
  www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/Hayek/Jochen/wp/blog-de

You can well imagine, which ones I rather prefer.

I could actually run WordPress (having in mind “all” my requirements)

• with some commercial service out there with a full-service package for quite a little money,
• or somehow self-hosted.

I may not be familiar enough with all the features, that commercial services offer, but … – right now I am going for “self-hosted”.

What are my options then? I could run my self-hosted WordPress …

1. with my Internet provider (not the one providing me with Internet connectivity, but the one providing me with IMAP+procmail,  with web space, and with Linux shell account access),
2. at home on a “general purpose” computer running 24×7,
3. at home on a “feature-rich” NAS, also running 24×7, but most of the time in stand-by mode.

Option 1: That Internet provider does not have 24×7 support, but still they are quite reliable. They were established as a service provider for the German science and communication community. I have been using their services for a lot of years now, and I quite like them.

Option 2:  it is rather unlikely I will ever manage to see them in stand-by mode.

Option 3 also seemed rather intriguing for a while, but …:

• they don’t let me use just whatever WordPress release, that I chose, and just fiddle with it, e.g. with the MultiSite feature;
• I also don’t want to get my NAS exploited from outside, because the blogs and their addresses get “a little well-known” and rather a target of interest for negative minds;
• last not least I rather like the idea, that most of the time my NASs run in stand-by mode with rather little power consumption and rather little wearout of the hard disks.

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
• …

With the WordPress standard set-up procedure you can run exactly one blog. If you start thinking about running another blog from your WordPress installation, that is not going to work.

If running more than one blog with only WordPress installation matters to you, it’s best to go for WordPress’s built-in “MultiSite”. You cannot change a running WordPress installation to be MultiSite, you rather have to take it down and also change its name, it will either make use of sub-domains or sub-directories.

Using the Bitnami set-up utility was not a choice for me, as it requires root privileges.

• I want to quickly add a new article from just any web page (“Press_This”)
• I want to quickly add a new article from any RSS or atom feed entry (“Press_This”)
• https – with the standard set-up all your blogging communication (including authorisation) goes unencrypted over the wire; there is a plugin for https/sll communication
• “nice names” for my blogs and also my articles
• http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-to-twitter/ : auto-posts a Twitter update when you update your WordPress blog or blogroll, with your chosen URL shortening service
• I set up “NetworkedBlogs” on Facebook to read my feeds an “forward” them to Facebook and Twitter
• “need plug-in that *sends* wp blog posts to google+ account” [link] – OnlyWire.com [link] does for G+, what NetworkedBlogs does for Facebook and Twitter
• http://wordpress.org/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/ – apparently needs a plugin, that cost 49$
• …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress