Wow, I've been in your exact situation, but at two seperate times.
I had a domain name and a host and was using blogger to post FTP to it. When China blocked Blogger back in 2005 I had to change tactics. I installed WordPress on my host and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made (on the Internet). Wordpress is phenomenal, I'll leave it at that. If you want to know more, I'm sure you'll ask me.
As for dilemma number 2 (what do I do with this website?), I've decided to lose my website entirely and start more focused one (about web standards). The problem with a "blog" is that almost by default it becomes a place to just spill. But since people now "spill" on twitter, facebook, myspace, flickr, picasa, youtube, vimeo, etc, etc, etc, it makes maintaining a site pretty tedious. I say you just pick a direction. Make the site about something specific like a hobby or a certain part of your profession you feel strongly about. Anyway, there's my 2 cents.
March 9, 2010 at 2:25:00 PM EST
[Image]Hello Stupidfresh fans & friends. Long time no talk!
Next month Blogger is making some changes to the way my site is setup. In short they're forcing some restrictions on how I publish to Stupidfresh, and that will change the look of the site, the way people access SF and the archiving of all the old posts. Nerdus explanation maximus: I publish using their CMS backend in conjunction with a hacked HTML template (that I'm quite proud of), which uploads any posts via FTP to my own hosted webspace. They are about to forbid that.
They offer a tool that will rebuild my site on their servers, and then direct any traffic to Stupidfresh back to them. I've already seen some people who have gone through this Blogger migration and it seems tumultuous at best. When I set this all up a few years ago, I spent a long time tweaking their system (in ways it apparently wasn't supposed to be tweaked), to make it work the way I wanted. And now all that is for naught.
So here I am, at my 295th Stupidfresh post using Blogger, trying to figure out what to do next.
Part of what makes this decision tricky is that in the past year Stupidfresh has been one of a few modalities I've been using to express myself online. I've jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, setup a Tumblr account for some subway haiku (that I have yet to officially tell anyone about), and I also maintain the blog for Theo's photos and videos.
I work with Picasa albums to privately share photos with friends and family, have started buzzing with Buzz, but as of yet have steered clear of Facebook, Flickr and Posterous.
Each of these outlets is for slightly different purposes, and each offers slightly different limitations. I'm questioning what direction to go in here, specifically with this blog. Is it time to roll everything into one web presence? Or should I choose one of these communication methods and roll with it. Hmmmmm.
It's time to evaluate what I'm using the web, and this website, for. Deep thoughts...
I would love to hear from people in the comments on how you're handling this complexity, or if you have ideas on what to do. I'll tell you this much - regardless of which way I go, I'm getting to 300 posts on this thing before March 26th!
"Which way to go?"
1 Comment -
Wow, I've been in your exact situation, but at two seperate times.
I had a domain name and a host and was using blogger to post FTP to it. When China blocked Blogger back in 2005 I had to change tactics. I installed WordPress on my host and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made (on the Internet). Wordpress is phenomenal, I'll leave it at that. If you want to know more, I'm sure you'll ask me.
As for dilemma number 2 (what do I do with this website?), I've decided to lose my website entirely and start more focused one (about web standards). The problem with a "blog" is that almost by default it becomes a place to just spill. But since people now "spill" on twitter, facebook, myspace, flickr, picasa, youtube, vimeo, etc, etc, etc, it makes maintaining a site pretty tedious. I say you just pick a direction. Make the site about something specific like a hobby or a certain part of your profession you feel strongly about. Anyway, there's my 2 cents.
March 9, 2010 at 2:25:00 PM EST