Category: blogging

Posts about blogging

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Combining free blog hosting with your own domain name.

Hosting a site on a free service like WordPress.com has some advantages. For one thing, they really keep the blogging software up to date, with constant improvements, new widgets, etc. You never have to lift a finger to upgrade. The problem is that you are limited as to disk space, bandwidth, etc. This is why this blog is not run on WordPress.com – I wanted to go beyond the services that WordPress provides for free. I have a rented server account with Dreamhost.com, on which I can host as many domain names as I need, with tons of bandwidth and storage.

I recently started a new skateboarding blog called “concretelunch.net“. I plan on using a lot of photos and videos on the site, which will require both disk space and bandwidth. I purchased the domain name, but I’d rather host the blog — which will be the “homepage” — for free on WordPress.com. At the same time, I want to use my Concretelunch.net domain name (so I can just refer to “concretelunch.net”, rather than “wordpress.concretelunch.com”) and also use that domain to host and serve large files, run other applications, etc.

Here is a nice way to make it all work. I set up the blog on WordPress.com. Then on my server, under the domain concretelunch.net, I deleted the existing index.html file, replacing it with index.php . The index.php file contains only the following code — a simple redirect to my WordPress.com blog:

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.yoursite.com’ ) ;
?>

The nice thing about using a redirect like this is that I can use WordPress.com’s free service for low bandwidth stuff, but if I want to point to something like a gallery URL, like “concretelunch.net/gallery” (which doesn’t exist yet), I can do that easily. Of course, this only works because the server I host my domain name on runs the PHP scripting language. However, you could easily find a PERL or JavaScript redirect script to use instead.

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Remind me not to upgrade, ever again

I upgraded my blog software, and it killed all my old images and videos. Not just the code, but my actual files are gone. Shit. Actually, it was my fault, but I’ll blame the upgrade process anyway. It required that the blog directory be empty, and I forgot that the images and videos were stored in a subdirectory.

 Ughh. This makes me want to just go back to coding everything with plain HTML.

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Spam magnet?

That last post about Campisi’s has attracted over 20 spam comments in less than 24 hours. Interesting. Normally this site, with fairly low traffic, might get about 2 or maybe 3 spam comments per day, which are all caught by Akismet. I wonder what in that post got the spammer’s attention. The built-in Akismet antispam application here at WordPress has killed off about half of them, but the others initially go through. Weird.

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I imported some entries

I’ve been writing about my Aikido learning process on another blog. Today I imported all those entries into this blog. I’ve decided to keep all my blogging stuff here. The advantages of having a free server, free updates and spam protection, etc, etc, are hard to beat. I also think the user interface is great. I might do some work on customizing a theme — we’ll see. WordPress just keep adding cool features to this system. I like it.

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aikido, life, and other stuff

It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve actually been experimenting with a blog on my other website, writing mostly about Aikido, which I started last month. The weather has been horrible, so no skateboarding. I’m taking the 2nd part of beginning Spanish at the local community college. That’s twice a week and Aikido twice a week. So I’m busy.

I’m still sort of torn between continuing to use WordPress and this free blog environment or go completely back to my other Moveable Type stuff. The nice thing about WordPress is the spam control. It really works well. I also like the built-in community here and stat tracking. I also like the “blogroll” feature here. On the other hand, I am really good at customizing Moveable Type, and I prefer its categorization system. Overall I think the convenience of WordPress my outweigh the customization of MT. When I find the time I may download WordPress and install it on my server and see what I can do with it.

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Blogging on the decline?

I haven’t been making a lot of posts lately, mainly because I just haven’t had that much to say. I’m trying to avoid the “what I had for lunch” type of posts.

Anyway, a coworker sent me a link to this article from Information Week, which discusses a report from the Gartner Group predicting that blogging will peak in the first half of 2007. I’m not surprised. Hell, I kept another blog for 2 years, and posted regularly, but a few months ago I decided to try to focus my efforts on specific subject areas. With concerns about online privacy growing, I think people will be less inclined to put up a lot of personal experiences, at least not without more anonymity.  There are so many other choices for online socializing too — flickr, tons of subject-specific message forums, groups, myspace — the list goes on. Then there is the fact that young people are increasingly using text messaging and other mobile technology to keep in touch rather than email and the web.

So I’ve been reading — or really just skimming — a lot of books about blogging from the last 2 or 3 years.  Seriously, I haven’t found any that were particularly interesting. The best one I’ve found is Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture. This book has interviews with a bunch of different, “sucessful” bloggers, who do lots of different kinds of blogs. Political, social, technology, personal, whatever. Nice thing about this book is you can pick the ones you are interested in, read one in 10 minutes or so, then do something else. Much like reading a blog.