Boy I tell ya’. Hosting your own is a far cry from doing it the Wordpress.com way. Such control and so many things to learn. Having all this control doesn’t do you much good when you don’t know how to use it.
What Plugin? What widget? What do I want? Why do I want it? What do they want? Where’s the asprin?
What do I need to do to optimize the thing? Heck I didn’t even know you could do that.
Site map…Meta descriptions…Meta headers…plugin this…widget that…where do I put these three lines of code anyway? Do you like green eggs and ham?
Good grief it’s enough to drive a guy nuts especially when he doesn’t have the clarity of a younger brain anymore. Ok, I’m not particularly old and musty yet, just more like near fifty than near forty but I’ve found that I’m just not that intuitive about things anymore. But I am more patient I have to give you that and I’ve needed it.
Still, when a blogger lets go of the mother host (shall we say) which in this case was Wordpress.com, you cast yourself adrift amongst all the other sites that exist on the web (a bit more than a ton and a half of ‘em) and you find that it’s up to you to do everything yourself including getting some attention paid to your blog and all the work you put into it. Most free hosting services take care of the basic search engine submissions for you but once you “host your own” you have to do that yourself as well which includes all the research and asking (the right) questions in the right places. There’s a bunch of ways to “optimize” your blog and I’ve found and implemented a few so far but don’t ask me to do it again. I’m not sure what I’ve done yet.
More to come though. I’ve had to spend more time setting up and adjusting and correcting mistakes than posting but the construction end of things should slow down here shortly and the posting of my usual varied drivel will pick back up again.
I can’t wait.
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December 2nd, 2006 at 6:30 am
Looks like you are off to a good start, I have just left the nest too, so I guess I will be popping back here to pick your brains on some of the things I need to do!
December 2nd, 2006 at 9:05 am
@UKStevieB
I’m still feeling my way around town here but I’d be glad to give you any info that I might have. A lady in the UK was in my current position when I went to hosting my own and she gave me a lot of help when I first started. You pick it up quick believe me and the Wordpress Codex (Wordpress.org) has a lot of info to give.
The best thing I can tell you now is get your new site set up good enough to post to (don’t stop posting), set a disclaimer on your previous blog if you had one, stating you moved and URL to the new site and then read, read, read. If you want to make things easier on yourself use a “widget-ready” theme. Just type “Wordpess Codex” into Google and you can find your way to the codex and from there…it’s easy.
If you know your way there already please disregard the above.
To get a good idea what you can do in just a couple months check out the “Sprites and Bites” link in my sidebar. She’s the one that helped me out. Real nice that one.
Have fun.