wordpress.com | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Beginning Blog Migration to Self-Hosted WordPress!

As I tweeted just a few minutes ago, my static IP address from GoDaddy became active tonight (a little over 24 hours into the 1-72 hour window I had been promised.) So I think this is the last post I will be writing on WordPress.com before we move to our new servers. Hopefully within 24-48 hours you’ll be seeing a new look for SMUG.

I’ll be tweeting the progress on the @SMUG_U account and also some on @LeeAase. So if you follow those, or set search.twitter.com to follow the #smug or #blogmigration hashtags, you’ll be able to participate vicariously. I expect that I may have questions along the way and will be tweeting them, so if you have tips or answers to offer, I’d appreciate you chiming in.

My Last WordPress.com Post (I Hope)

As I mentioned in Blogging 310, I’m making the switch from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress platform. I appreciate all the suggestions and guidance I’ve received via Twitter and through the post comments. I particularly want to call out Bill Ferriss (@billfer), who also works in the health care Web world. He also runs a blog about the Detroit Tigers, which means I guess that he should be my sworn enemy, since I’m a Minnesota Twins fan. Just goes to show the powerful unifying force of Twitter. 😉

It seems there are a lot of good hosting options available, ranging from shared hosting, in which your space is among several others on the same server, to dedicated hosting, in which you are on your own real or virtual server. The former is generally a few dollars a month, while the latter typically starts at $50 a month and goes up from there. As I mentioned, I’m really cheap, and Bill says shared hosting is probably a good place to start (although he’s outgrown it.)

I had gone to check out options at these various sites, including GoDaddy.com, where I have registered the domain name for SMUG. I also got a good illustration of some smart techniques for upselling customers, when I received this email yesterday:

The folds at GoDaddy know I’m in the market for hosting services because I visited those portions of the site, and they’re giving me an incentive to choose them. Smart business.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Tonight, after I get back from my son’s basketball game against the nearby rival Albert Lea Tigers, I’m going to start the switch. I’ll be tweeting about the process on the @SMUG_U account (please follow if you haven’t already) using the hashtags #smug and #blogmigration, and giving a real-time account of the process. As you follow and get my Tweets (although I know most SMUGgles have better things to do on their Saturday nights) , please feel free to share any pointers.

I’ll also be capturing screenshots and videos for more 300-level Blogging courses. Through Twitter I’ll have time stamps that mark how long each step takes. Hopefully I will be resuming the Twitter curriculum (and the advanced Blogging courses) on Monday on my new GoDaddy server and with a new theme.

Updated 1/5/09: As of this morning, about 35 hours after I activated my GoDaddy hosting account, they still haven’t completed the account set-up. I understand that my purchase at 10 p.m. on Saturday is probably unusual, but GoDaddy advertises itself as a 24/7 provider. I guess setting up is more labor intensive, and I don’t mind them not working Sundays. In fact, I would support that. But when they say it should be done within 24 hours, they should indicate the weekend exception.

Blogging 310: Taking the Self-Hosted WordPress Plunge

When I started this blog 30 months ago, my goal was to get hands-on experience with blogging. I was going to be responsible for our new media/social media initiatives at Mayo Clinic, and it seemed reasonable that I should dive in and become familiar with the tools and what they can do, so I could recommend the best way to apply them in my work.

Here were the criteria I set for myself in choosing a blogging platform:

It had to be easy. I needed to be able to set it up myself, without any help from our IT department. This was for my personal learning and enrichment, so I wasn’t about to ask IT to help. Not that they would have (or should have) even if I had asked. They’re great people, but they have other priorities, like managing the medical and billing records for over a million patients a year, and all of the other administrative data required for an organization with 50,000 employees. The three major platforms I examined — Blogger, TypePad and WordPress — all met that standard.
Free had to be an option. I also was really cheap. I didn’t want to have to spend anything out of pocket to learn about blogging. That kicked Typepad out of consideration, because its minimum was $4.95 a month. Did I mention that I’m really cheap?
A self-hosting upgrade option was desirable. I wanted to explore a platform that would allow me to grow, and that could be used for intranet blogs, too, so that we could get accustomed to a common interface. That meant wordpress.com was edging ahead, because Blogger is a strictly Internet solution. I wanted to have an upgrade path that could include domain mapping, and that would let me eventually move to a hosting service (for more control) without breaking links and losing Google juice.
The Robert Scoble Tiebreaker. It wasn’t really a tie: as indicated by the factors above, I was leaning toward WordPress.com. But I figured if that service was good enough for someone as savvy as Scoble, it could meet my needs. That settled it.

I have been extremely happy with my decision, and my blogging on wordpress.com has been fun, rewarding and cheap. For the most part, anything you see on this blog is something you could do without IT support and at no cost. I believe that to this point my total investment, including domain mapping and additional storage upgrades and a domain name from GoDaddy.com, has been about $30. And I have helped several people start blogs for which they have yet to spend a cent.

The WordPress.com service has been great, and they continually add more value, such as the 3 GB of free storage. I have absolutely no complaints.

But now, it’s time to take the next step and move to a self hosted solution. My main reasons:

I want to explore custom plug-ins and widgets. WordPress.com strips out javascript because they don’t want one bit of malicious code on one blog to potentially affect millions of blogs. But that means I can’t embed many videos on my wp.com blogs, except for those that are on YouTube. Thankfully, YouTube is the biggest source of Web video, and wp.com does support it. But I know there are other high-quality YouTube players that will look better, and other potential sources of Web video. And that’s just a start. The plug-ins and widgets are my main reason for the move.
I want better statistics. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can’t install Google Analytics, because WordPress.com has it already installed. You get some helpful free statistics from your dashboard with wp.com’s Blog Stats, but nothing as extensive as Google Analytics.
I figure Google ad revenue will at least match my server costs. With wordpress.com you can’t run Google or other ads (and as Scoble says, what do you expect when you are getting a ton of value for free?) WordPress.com runs some Google ads to fund its free services. I would expect that if I run Google ads I can do likewise.
I want to make my blogging easier. I’ve been illustrating workarounds that enable people to overcome WordPress.com’s limits by thinking creatively. For example, I found this information on how to put social bookmarking buttons on wordpress.com blog posts, but it takes a couple of minutes for each post. At some point the workarounds become too much work. I think that after 669 posts I’ve shown that I’m going to stick with this blogging thing. It would be a lot easier to just install the ShareThis widget and save time with each future post.
It’s the Burden of a Chancellor to explore new frontiers. If I’m going to do 300-level courses in the Blogging curriculum, I need to be able to demonstrate some of the advanced functionality of the full-powered WordPress software. And I chose wordpress.com (and implemented domain mapping about a year ago) because it should make this migration fairly easy (at least as compared to Steve Rubel’s experience trying to move from Typepad to WordPress.) So now it’s time to prove it.
It’s preparing for some other possible migrations. I started this blog to get hands-on experience with blogging, and have applied what I’ve learned in my work. We have several Mayo Clinic blogs now hosted on WordPress.com that we may want to enhance similarly by moving to a self-hosted solution. If there are any hiccups in the migration process, I want them to happen on my personal blog, not a work-related one.

I did a Google search for some related “how to” posts on making the move, and found a few resources that may be somewhat helpful. Here’s
an overview of the process. This one has a PDF that seems like its step-by-step instructions may be really helpful, with this related post.

My case may be a little more complicated, though. I already have leeaase.wordpress.com mapped to social-media-university-global.org. So I’m not sure how I can have a blog hosted at that same domain name on another hosting service without having some periods of broken links. Maybe it won’t be a big deal (this post makes it seem relatively simple), but for now at least it’s an unknown to me. Which means it’s a learning opportunity.

Another helpful post I found was this one which tells how to install WordPress on a Macintosh using MAMP. This will let me export my blog from wordpress.com and import it on my laptop. Once I get that part figured out, it should make it much faster when I do the switch for real with a Web hosting service.

This also seems a good time to move because the holidays (and weekends) are slow periods for blog traffic. So if I have any glitches or 404 – Not Found errors while I’m making the switch, they would be minimized if I can get the migration completed by Monday.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for recommendations on a Web hosting service. I purchased my domain name (social-media-university-global.org) from GoDaddy. Would it make the most sense to use GoDaddy for my hosting? I’ve also had recommendations for bluehost.com, enginehosting.com, liquidweb.com, mediatemple.net and ANhosting. All other things being equal, I’ll probably go for the low-cost option (remember what I said about being really cheap?)

But if you have feedback to share about this migration process in general (or hosting services in particular), I would love to hear from you. If you have either raves or rants to share, I would appreciate the guidance.

After I’ve first migrated successfully to my laptop, I will pick one of those services and make the move. And I’ll document the process along the way to make it easier for other SMUGgles when you’re ready to give it a shot.

RAQ: Can I keep my username from showing on a WordPress.com blog post?

SMUGgle Pam Larson, who is starting a new blog as one of her projects for 2009 (and who also lives across the street from Old Main), sent me a text message this morning with the following question:

If I don’t want my user name to show up under each post, can I delete that line? I can’t find that option.

As I see it, there are three potential ways to accomplish this. The first is easy. The other two aren’t. And this points to a new phase of learning I’m beginning as your Chancellor.

Solution #1: Pick a different theme

I was surprised when I helped my parents start a blog with some of their locally politically active friends, that when they wrote some posts the usernames weren’t published. They had picked the “Cutline” theme by Chris Pearson from among the free choices on WordPress.com.

So switching themes would be the quickest and easiest way to accomplish this goal. But Pam likes her current theme, so it doesn’t solve her problem.

Solution #2: Edit CSS

This is a paid upgrade option on WordPress.com that lets you tailor the look of your blog. It costs $15 a year. The best part is you can experiment with CSS and learn how to use it, and preview the changes, before you have to pay. Then, when you pay for the upgrade, your changes become visible to the world.

You need to know about CSS to use this productively, but the good news is that WordPress.com has a CSS customization forum where you can learn. I think I’ll spend some time playing with this.

But because editing CSS doesn’t allow you to edit the underlying theme, I have a feeling this still won’t solve Pam’s problem, unless she were to switch to the Sandbox theme and try to rebuild her blog’s look from scratch. I won’t really know that until after I’ve played with CSS for a while.

Solution #3: Self-Hosted Blog

This is the most complicated option, but it gives you the most control over the final look and feel of your blog. It also requires that you rent server space and install the free WordPress software on it (from WordPress.org.) As the next step in my social media learning (and to help me write some 300-level courses), I’m planning to move SMUG a self-hosted platform in 2009. More on that in a future post.

Conclusion:

It doesn’t appear that there is an easy answer for Pam’s question, that would let her keep the look she likes. Option 1 gets rid of the username but by changing the theme, Option 2 probably doesn’t solve the problem (and requires substantial work) and Option 3 could definitely work, but would cost more and take more work.

If any other SMUGgles have a better solution, please chime in and let us all learn from you!

Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets

In response to this post about how you can put a “Follow Me” Twitter badge on your WordPress.com blog, budgallant says:

that’s interesting, but definitely not at alternative to actually displaying the twitter updates…. what is up with wordpress? do they have a bias against twitter?

It’s not an anti-Twitter thing; it’s about WordPress.com stripping any javascript that you attempt to paste into one of its widgets. They say it’s a security measure, and I’ll take them at their word. I suppose if you have several million blogs on one server domain, you don’t want one with malicious code to bring the whole platform down. So the easy way out is to not allow anything but straight HTML in sidebar widgets.

Thankfully, there is a way around the problem, that lets you both have a badge people can click to follow you, and also display your latest Tweets.

You do the first part by following the instructions I had in the previous post.

Putting the latest Tweets in is actually easier, because Twitter provides an RSS feed that you can pull into an RSS widget in WordPress.com.

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