Why setting up your own self-hosted wordpress blog is not hard.

Db0

De vieilles entraillesThe third most popular reason people seem to have for not self-hosting their own blog seems to be a misguided understanding of the technical skills and expertise such an undertaking would require.

I’ve heard various takes on this, Some seemed to believe that they would have to code their own site while others assumed that setting up a home server would be necessary. These are, of course, more extreme opinions so I will assume that most people know that setting up your own wordpress installation involves none of that if you don’t want it to.

De vieilles entrailles
CC - credit: Sunfox

The third most popular reason people seem to have for not self-hosting their own blog seems to be a misguided understanding of the technical skills and expertise such an undertaking would require.

I’ve heard various takes on this, Some seemed to believe that they would have to code their own site while others assumed that setting up a home server would be necessary. These are, of course, more extreme opinions so I will assume that most people know that setting up your own wordpress installation involves none of that if you don’t want it to.

The honest to Gould truth is that setting up your own wordpress powered site is usually a breeze.

Do you have the impression that self-hosting includes you ftp-connecting, php-editing, apache-configuring and whatnot? If so let me get this out there first. Self-hosting yout blog can be about as easy as setting up a new blogger account or as difficult as any DYI project. It’s all depending on what you wish to do.

Most shared hosting providers not only provide an already setup environment for installing wordpress but they make installing and upgrading the whole wordpress installation as simple as possible. Literaly an one-step process. You can have a new wordpress installation with as much as putting a new password and pressing OK twice.

Once you’ve set up a basic wordpress installation, just with the very default settings you’re good to go. All you need to do is find a theme (and even that’s optional), and if you’re with a good host you’ll have a few waiting for you and you’re ready. No need to tweak any css or php files.

Some of you might think at this point: “But what about new themes and plugins, don’t they need ftp thingamajibs and whatnot?”

Not any more they don’t. Plugin or Theme installations has in recent times become a ridiculously easy procedure. You’ll be hard pressed to find any instances where as part of improving your site you’ll have to get your hands dirty.

Upgrades? One Click. Backup? One Click. SEO? One Click.

So tell me, does hosting your own blog still sound too technical?

The costs of self-hosting your blog

Db01 Comment

the curl of datasmokeWhat many people seem to be wary of hosting their own blog or site is that it is somehow going to cost and arm and a leg, or at least a heavy enough sum that it’s just not worth doing. Add to that the misconception that self-hosting is only something that pro-bloggers are doing and you can understand why most people stay with free and limited hosts.

the curl of datasmoke
CC - photo credit: zen

What many people seem to be wary of hosting their own blog or site is that it is somehow going to cost and arm and a leg, or at least a heavy enough sum that it’s just not worth doing. Add to that the misconception that self-hosting is only something that pro-bloggers are doing and you can understand why most people stay with free and limited hosts.

Let me get this out of the way first. Self-hosting is not expensive, not unless you consider 1-10$ a month an expensive amount to spent on a hobby, and lets face it, if you’re not a pro-blogger, it is a hobby for you. It is a  way to reach out to other minds out there and make your voice heard. Possibly have some fun with memes, and hopefully affect the world in some way.

At the most expensive plan, self-costing would probably cost you as much as a night out to the movies per month but in return, instead of a 2 hour (hopefully not-lame) entertainment you not only get to own your data but you get much more freedom in what you can do with your site, more visibility and authority due to your own domain, more security (as someone whom you pay, you can keep accountable for problems as well) and a wealth of other goodies that come along for the same price.

What’s the downside? One less crappy holywood movie per month. It’s about time you found out what the better choice™ is anyway.

I honestly don’t know why so many people have this impression that hosting costs are high. With the profileration of shared hosting, costs have dropped to almost nothing. Web hosts practically fall over each other to be cheaper than each other and the final beneficiary is you.
I don’t know, maybe you’re stuck in the 90s where you were paying by the megabyte and assume that for a normal blog you’ll rack hundreds of euros/dollars of cost per month. If so, rest assured that unless you can fill up a few terrabytes of traffic or hundreds of gigabytes of space, you probably won’t end up paying anything more than the basic costs.

Now, to be fair, there is a chance that a basic hosting will not be enough. I do not currently pay the basic 8$ per month costs I started with. I pay 30$. You know why? Because I am hosting at the moment 4 individuals blogs and 2 galleries. My cost have nothing to do with bandwidth or space and everything to do with script heavy sites (of my own choice) and a recent influx of visitors. Were I to simplify my sites and reduce the 35 of so plugins per site I’m using, my speeds and costs would improve considerably.
That said, someone might require a faster, stronger plan to have a quick and usable site if he gets more that 500 visitors per day but at this point, a few ads could easily not only retrieve the costs but bring you money as well. Something you wouldn’t be able to do in some free hosts for example.

At this point you may be wondering why more people are not self-hosting if it’s not that cheap. Frankly, I’m wondering the same myself. Hopefully by the end of this post I will have dispelled at least the misconception of cost. Stay tuned for more of the same in the later posts of this series.

If you still have concerns on the issue of cost, let me know in the comments and we can discuss if you have a point.

Stumbleupon guide for Atheists and Agnostics

Db0

The Atheist Revolution has a great guide for using stumbleupon as a blogger. I was actually planning to write such a guide as an extension of my posts on reddit but he pretty much covered all the bases.

The only thing I want to add is that it’s also useful to stumble through your friends favorites and vote up the good ones. I also reiterate the advise that you don’t stumble onto your own blog if you can help it, or else they’l start punshing this.

Btw, does anyone else think that simply stumbling on a post of your blog, after someone else has reviewed it first does not help? I had the impression that each further vote brings more visitors, but every time I voted up one of my pages that was already stumbled, I didn’t see much of a difference. The number of visitors certainly has something to do with the number of votes however as one of my most popular posts got 1000 visitors in one day simply because it was voted up many times.

Perhaps this only counts if someone votes up after stumbling onto it randomly, instead of doing it deliberately. And this is where stubling on your friend’s favorites can be useful 😉

You can find my profile here.

So you don't want to be a pro-blogger eh?

Db02 Comments

yesterday and todayOne of the most popular reasons for which bloggers avoid getting their own hosted account seems to be that they assume that this is something appropriate only pro-bloggers. About half of the responders until now have expressed this sentiment and I can understand that as it was my impression when I started blogging back in livejournal.

The reasons we turn to blogging are numerours. I won’t get into specifics but I believe that each of us needs to introspect and distill the exact reason(s) they is doing this.

yesterday and todayOne of the most popular reasons for which bloggers avoid getting their own hosted account seems to be that they assume that this is something appropriate only pro-bloggers. About half of the responders until now have expressed this sentiment and I can understand that as it was my impression when I started blogging back in livejournal.

The reasons we turn to blogging are numerours. I won’t get into specifics but I believe that each of us needs to introspect and distill the exact reason(s) they is doing this. My own, for example, are (in order of importance)

  1. To express my philosophy and hopefully make someone’s life better.
  2. To write down and spread my knowledge and experience to others.
  3. To serve as my personal soap box where friends and family can come for news.

In all of these reasons, pro-blogging (having money as your primary reason) never appears in any form. Indeed, in the Division by Zer0 you will not find even  a single advertisement as of this moment. Money is simply not my target.

And I’m not the only one. If you look around, you’ll see quite a few people with self-hosted blogs that have very little to do with pro-blogging. Many of them don’t have ads. Many of them post quite irregularly.

And yet, we all went with self hosting. Why? Control.

WordPress is a brilliant CMS and If you think blogger is good enough, it is just because you have never seen what is possible if your have this power.

Do you want a simple blog where all you want to do is write a post now and then, manage your comments, see your stats and not much else? Why not have a choice of hundreds, if not thousands of themes, easily customizable (much, much more easily than blogger, believe you me) and with perfect control of every aspect?

How about using hundreds of widgets for anything you might think of, where before you might either have to rely (and pay) a third party or not have the choice at all (as in the case of wordpress.com and livejournal)?

Total control and oversight?

It has it all.

What if you change your mind down the line and decide to actually make some money of your blogging? As humans, we change all the time. I went from the default livejournal account to self-host in one year. I went from posting mundane life stuff to posting primarily philosophically and tech in the next year. As a result I’ve seen my readership quadruple in a very short amount of time.

Thus, even though I am still not even close to being a pro-blogger (nor do I plan to be one), It would be a nightmare for me now to go back to free hosting. Having to wait until blogger codes a needed feature that’s been around for ages everywhere else? Having to beg wordpress.com to allow a simple script? No thanks.

Self-hosting is not for making money. It’s all about retaining control of your own little place in the internet and doing anything you might want to without relying on a third party in any way. If your reasons for not doing it is because you’re not aiming for success, then you’re not only missing out but you may end up regretting it later.

A chain reaction of popularity

Db0

It seems that someone noticed what I wrote about reddit:atheism and decided to submit all his posts to reddit [1. UPDATE: It seems he didn’t submit all of them after all. I just noticed he’s been mainly submitting his own posts on reddit for a while (that pop whore) and didn’t notice the dates. Just ignore the “all” 😉 ] which led to one of them being resubmitted to digg which ended with their server going b0nkers.

It was at this point that one wonders “Where the hell is your supercache” :P. I could practically hear in my mind’s ear, Adrian going “Hooooooooly Shiii-“

Well, at least now you know how useful submitting your better posts to reddit can be 😉

PS: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Goddamn pop-posts getting dugg and then getting as many hits in one hour as I get in one month. It’s not fair I tells ya! [/rant]

Gold medal of…doping

Db0

We interrupt our normal broadcast to bring you these hilarious news

Greece has been awarded the gold medal for doping (article in greek) from the president of the IOC Jacques Rogge. He has apparently named and shamed the Greek team as the most doped up team in the Beijing Olympics with the second and third places being taken by Bulgaria and Russia.

For a country that is so hell bent in maintaining a good image, they have managed to put yet another badge of shame on themselves (following the ban on computer games, suing lesbians and other funny stories)

You know what the sad part it? It’s the government itself that is promoting this kind of behaviour. After the recent shame came up, did anything happen? Was anyone fired or forced to resign? No.

Same as in the past where the doping of two Athletes was ignored and they were eventually not punished at all by the greek national sports comitee, only to have them 1 year later admit to the IAAF that, you know, they did dope themselves.

Pathetic.

But at least it makes this easily amused expartiate laugh at their antics.

The Reddit Community and Why It's Useful for Freethinkers

Db0

So you’ve used the reddit voting system, you got some hits and you love the minimalism of it. By now you may have even gotten a post on the front page by which point you may have noticed quite a lot of comments, a lot of them inane, while others are long-winded. Should you care or pay attention if they’re not commenting on your own blog?

They’re talking about your thoughts and opinions aren’t they?

If you’re like me, and your main purpose in blogging is to spread your knowledge and replicate your ideas in other minds, comments are your bread and butter. There’s nothing else I give more credence to, than receiving comments (well, receiving trackbacks is also nice) and apparently the reddit community is more than happy to do just that.

The reason why so many people comment on reddit, instead of your own site is the same reason reddit is attractive in the first place: Ease of Use. It is much simpler for a logged in redditor to leave a comment on the story link than to leave in the comments of a blog. This just reinforces my impression that comment usability is important.

Just compare how many comments Vjack’s latest (excellent) post has received, compared to how many are under the reddit story and you will see what I mean.

Another useful feature of reddit is that it makes it easier for people to continue a conversation once someone replies to them. It is not as good as getting an email as with Intense Debate, but as soon as someone visits reddit, they will be able to see that they have a new message, which is really the direct reply to a previous comment. This really keeps the conversation flowing, unlike a blog where unless someone subscribes to the comments, they will most likely forget. If you want people to pay attention to your writing, you have a chance to make them pay attention there 😉

Some may have some reservations about the quality of the comments that one may find in reddit. I’m glad to say that from personal experience, the maturity level of the redditors is quite higher than, say, digg. Not ony do you find great commentary but if you’re lucky, you can get some instant blogging material as well 😉

As you’d expect, comments can be voted as well. This has the effect of making the least liked comments drop to the bottom while having the more insightful ones immediately visible. Very good for avoiding trolling and finding the interesting stuff to reply to.

“What about Karma?” I hear you ask. Well, in reddit’s, it’s not a case of a silly woo-woo belief in metaphysical retribution but it is a semi-accurate representation of a user’s activity and success in reddit. You get rated both on the quality of your comments and your posts. It’s not really important but it’s nice to see increase.

One final thing, relating to the various subreddits. What I have noticed in the Atheosphere is that generally the same news keep being recycled over and over. At some point one can always read so much about Crackergate, pedophile priests and whatnot. Using the various subreddits to subscribe to the things that interest you will not only allow you to increase the various subjects you might write about but it can help you posts your articles in various categories and reach a wider audience.

Sometimes it is worth hearing opinions outside our limited circle of the Godless.

How to use Reddit:Atheism and Increase your Readership

Db02 Comments

As I have taken recently a bigger interest in my blogging methods I have started paying a bit more attention to what services work and how. I have taken a special interest in what is related to Atheism and how the Atheosphere (which I’m hoping you’re a part of) can utilize them to increase our visibility.

To this end I wanted to raise your attention to the Atheism subreddit which has gone live a short 6 months ago, shortly after the creation of custom reddits was implemented. Within that short time it has acquired more than 15K subscribers which, if you consider that the most any subreddit has is 53K is pretty impressive.

Some of you may wonder how reddit:atheism has achieved this significant amount of users when The Atheist Spot is still struggling to get more than 5 votes on any individual post. The answer lies in usability.

Reddit is really simple and really minimalistic. Most things take just one click to achieve and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything requiring more than two of them. Indeed, a lot of care has been put to create widgets and bookmarklets that make voting and submitting as quick and painless as possible for logged in users.

How does this simplicity help?

First of all, as a simple reader you can just grab the bookmarklet(s), (put them in a folder if you want) and once you’re in an article worthy of your interests (not just atheism) just vote it up. If it’s on reddit you’re just told that it’s voted (without leaving the page!) and if it’s not, you can submit it with an extra click. How easy is that?

Contrary to digg (and clones) you don’t have to type a description or check for duplicates and pass through a 10 step process to submit. The only thing you need is the url and title which are automatically grabbed. If you have your favorite subreddits selected, the choices of where to submit are one of them, which make it a breeze to send to where it belongs.

As a blogger, all you have to do is grab one of the widgets and put it in the area of your choice. You can see mine on the sidebar under the “popularity” header. Not only does this allow your visitors to vote up/down and see how popular a post is but they (if they are good an loyal readers 😉 ) can submit it with an extra click of the mouse. There’s practically no reason not to have the widget somewhere.

How about increasing readership?

Until now I considered Stumbleupon one of my better referrers as I would get at least a 100 hits per time one of my articles was stumbled. However after using reddit for a while now, I think there’s a new contender. Since the 7th, I have had five of my posts sumbitted on reddit, of which just one passed 5 votes (none passed 20) and I still got almost 600 unique visitors and my subscibers increased by 1/3. Compare that to Stumbleupon in which I had five posted since the middle of July and it still only barely managed to exceed 600 hits.

To be fair, Stumbleupon had a much lower bounce rate but I was pretty much testing the waters in reddit and submitting anything. Which leads me to my next point.

Submitting

As I said above, my submissions above ended up with me just getting downmodded quite aggresively. Even the post I assumed would do well barely got 5 points. It became obvious that the reddit crowd is quite opinionated.
To tell the truth, I still haven’t found the winning formula (impossible in 2 weeks) but I have noticed that news usually hit the top but insightful posts tend to do quite well. This is good news for people like me who generally don’t just repeat the same content over and over. Hell, even my interview did ok.

One good tip is to provide some kind of image for your posts. As reddit grabs an image automatically, it usually grabs the first image in the page. If you don’t have a header image like me, the first one is usually the article related pic which should hopefully be related to your content. From personal experience I find that images tend to attract attention.

There are two other good things about submitting in reddit however.

1. You can submit to more than one subreddit at a time.

While news tend to do good in Atheism, in the small cousin subreddit of Freethought, blogposts and opinions tend to do quite well. If you submit to both and someone votes from your site or with a bookmarklet, both will rise in votes.

If you write something that might be of interest to different crowds (say, Atheists and Bloggers) you should submit to all the appropriate categories.

2. New posts are not hidden away

It is a classic problem in Digg and Atheist Spot (for me at least) that when one submits a new post, that is hidden away in a special tab reserved for upcoming stories. This means that unless your topic happens to hit the front page by the few(er) that view these submissions, you’ll rarely see any referrals.

Reddit does this differently, when a new post is sumbitted, it appears without a rank on the front page and can be voted up and down. Once some time has passed, the rank appears and you can see how well it does. This hiding of the rank and appearing on the front means that even if you get downvoted by the various trolls that lurk in reddit, you can still get some views and hopefully catch up.

Another interesting thing is that the front page is not just the top posts but rather the order is decided by time and votes. Thus, as time passes, a post starts dropping and can only be buoyed up by getting voted on. Eventually there’s no one else to vote and it drops off, but until then it’s quite possible for a post to hang around in the middle of the page for a day or so, even with less than 10 votes. For blogs where we might get our normal visitors over the span of two or three days this is especially useful.

Solidarity

As I mentioned above, there are troll that lurk in reddit and opinions can differ quite a bit and as a result we may need at least a bit of solidarity as Atheobloggers. I make it a habit now to always vote up articles of bloggers where the widget is displayed (and the article is voted), unless I outright disagree. The more of us that register and do this, the better all of us will do. Since voting up is so quick & simple, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.

To be continued…

This post is starting to get a bit long winded with all the things I want to say so I’ll stop here. Look for the next (and hopefully last) part of this series where I’ll explain how the commenting system of reddit gives some unique opportunities for extended dialogue, the fun of memes, karma, maturity and various other little tidbits.