blogging

WordPress: Host it Yourself or Host on WordPress.com

I sent someone some advice on WordPress hosting and made the mistake of posting about it on Twitter, which resulted in a couple of requests to blog about it.

I started this blog as the Open Source Culture blog (later renamed the Open Culture blog) on Blogspot.com. Last April, I rebranded the blog as Fast Wonder and moved it to WordPress.com. After a few months, I grew increasingly frustrated with the limitations of WordPress.com, and I moved it to my own hosting provider. Based on this experience, I tend to recommend that most (but not all) people host their own WordPress installations, instead of using WordPress.com.

There are a number of benefits of hosting WordPress on your own domain.

  • You can use a custom feed and have it auto-discovered (I highly recommend the free FeedBurner service). The benefit of a custom feed is that you can move your blog around, rename it, etc. and keep the same FeedBurner feed forever to avoid losing subscribers.
  • You can have a custom favicon on your own host, but on WordPress.com, you are stuck with the WordPress favicon.
  • You can get better analytics (Google analytics are also free) if you host it yourself.
  • You have more control over the theme, since you can hack on the templates files, while you are more limited to just css changes on WordPress.com
  • It also seems like some countries may be blocking all of WordPress.com, so if you do business globally in certain countries this may or may not be important depending on how you use your blog. Thanks to Aaron Hockley for reminding me of this issue.

For people already on WordPress.com, it is pretty easy to migrate to your own host without losing comments, posts, etc. with the WordPress export / import.

There are some potential disadvantages to hosting your own WordPress installation:

  • Hosting it yourself requires a fair amount of technical knowledge to install.
  • You have to keep up with installing the WordPress security updates, which can be a lot more work to maintain.

Yes, I am a big fan of hosting my own WordPress installs; however it really isn’t for everyone. If you aren’t at least roughly familiar with databases and installing PHP applications, I wouldn’t try it yourself. Also, if you have a very small blog and really don’t want to do much customization or spend much time on it, then I would go with WordPress.com and not host it yourself.

There are probably some other advantages and disadvantages, so drop them in the comments if I missed anything.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Why Companies Should Have Online Communities

As a community manager, I frequently take online communities for granted. Are you a business? Do you have or want to have customers? Then yes, of course you should have an online community (is that really a question?)

I’m here at Innotech this week, and this question came up on my panel about Online Communities. I wanted to share and elaborate on my answer to the question of “Why build an online community in the first place?”

I have a few reasons:

  • People: Communities first & foremost are about the people. Having a community gives people a place to engage with your company. These people will talk about you and your products in blogs and other online forums whether you choose to participate or not, so giving people a place to talk about you can help you keep engaged with the conversations.
  • Product Innovation: Communities provide a great forum for getting product feedback. It gives you a central place to ask questions about how people use your products. You also get to see first-hand what they complain about, what issues they have, and where they have questions about you or your products.
  • Evangelism: Communities also help you grow evangelists for your products from outside of your company. These are the customers or users of your products that are passionate and deeply engaged with you. Interestingly enough, these people frequently come to your defense within the community when people say negative things about your company. They can also have exceptional feedback for you, so it is important to identify these people early and encourage them to get deeply engaged (often with some special community permissions). For Jivespace, I created a special “Friends of Jivespace” blog with top community members as authors.
  • Brand Loyalty: Having a community can also help drive brand loyalty for your products. Giving people a place to engage with you can drive a tremendous amount of loyalty for your products.

These were my top four reasons, but I’m sure there are many more reasons to build an online community. I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

portland

The Portland Entrepreneur: POSSE Meeting Wed. 4/16

POSSE, the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneur group is holding an open meeting on Wednesday at 5 pm at Jax Bar to kick off our speaker series on “The Portland Entrepreneur.” We’ll be hosting Martin Medeiros, a lawyer who specializes in open source and has lots of investment experience and connections to VCs in the area talk about what makes a “Portland Entrepreneur.” This is a group where we focus on the business side of open source, and we’d love to see you there.

I’ve been a member of POSSE for a little over a year. Usually, we have small member meetings, but we want to start bringing in more speakers and open it up for more people to attend. We are also actively looking for new members.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

portland

Don't Miss Innotech This Week in Portland!

I wanted to just remind everyone about InnoTech here in Portland this week. I will be there on Wednesday and Thursday, April 16th and 17th.

A few things that I am involved in or excited about:

  • Jive Software CEO, Dave Hersh, is presenting on “Ready or Not? Assessing Your Collaboration 2.0 Preparedness” at 9:30am on April 17th. Dave is a great speaker, so you won’t want to miss it!
  • The eMarketing Summit has some great content, and it will be kicked off on the 16th with a panel including Dawn Foster (me), Jeff Hardison, Kerry McClenahan, and Barry Tallis to talk about Strategies for Planning & Building an Online Community
  • I will also be moderating a panel about Open Source Communities on April 17th with some amazing panelists and open source rock stars: whurley, Stormy Peters, Danese Cooper, and John Mark Walker. The session is part of an all day open source tracking being organized by Raven Zachary.
  • There are many other great sessions at InnoTech including: Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics), Ward Cunninham (inventor of the wiki), Brian Jamison, Andrew Aitken, Jason Mauer, Steve Morris, and many more.

Cost-wise, this event is really reasonable, and it is a great opportunity to learn and meet interesting people.

portland

Just Launched: Portland is Awesome

Yay! I just launched a new blog, Portland is Awesome, to celebrate all that is wonderful about Portland. We have so many great technology blogs, and group blogs run by big media, but Portland has such an independent (non-corporate) culture. I wanted to create something independent and fun to cover all of those other Portland topics.

If you want to be an author, send me an email (geekygirldawn on gmail) with your desired username and a link to your existing blog. Assuming that your writing style is a good fit for Portland is Awesome, I will get your account set up and you can start contributing!

jive software

Clearspace 2.0, Acquisition of Jotlet, Openfire Enterprise Goes Open Source and more

This weekend, we announced a bunch of changes at Jive.

We released Clearspace 2.0, including a renaming of Clearspace X to Clearspace Community. We also upgraded Jivespace to Clearspace Community 2.0 with an update to the look and feel, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time yesterday and today doing lots of testing and some tweaking.

Jive announced our acquisition of Jotlet. While I love to see Jive acquiring cool technology, I am even more excited that Adam Wulf relocated from Texas to Portland as part of the acquisition. Make sure you give @adamwulf a big Portland tech community welcome.

While Openfire has been open source for a long time, Openfire Enterprise had been a proprietary add-on to the open source version … until now. Openfire Enterprise is also being released under an opn source license.

The press has also been writing about the changes (search Google News if you don’t believe me). I won’t go into too much detail here, since the blog posts linked above have a bunch of details, but I am excited about the changes!

blogher

BlogHer Recap: Day Two

Here are a few nuggets of information that people have been talking about at BlogHer Business.

It is important to be a real person with a real personality when working with online communities. You have to be authentic, and in order to do that your personality has to come through and you become the face of the company for that community. You represent the company, but you also represent yourself, and it’s important to maintain your personal credibility.

People’s identities can get too wrapped up in their company, especially when it is a startup, to the point where their online identity is entirely based on their job at one company. What happens when they need to move on to the next thing? Will they be perceived as credible on their own merits?

Human part of blogging is that people will make mistakes. The biggest way to overcome an issue is to be transparent, honest, and admit mistakes. People will be more forgiving if you are transparent and honest. Allowing negative comments can also increase your credibility. People will say negative things about your product or your blog whether they say them on your site or their blogs. The way that you respond to the negative comments can help you rather than hurt. If you delete the negative comments, people will find out, and you (or your company) will look bad when people find out that you delete opinions that you don’t agree with. Delete the spam and discriminatory comments, but leave the objections as an opportunity to respond and engage in the conversation.

It is amazing how many senior managers at very large companies are not aware of what people are saying about their brands online on blogs and other sites. More people are becoming aware of what people are saying, but it doesn’t always make its way to the top.

Companies who want to blog need to either have time or money to dedicate to the effort. You need to have someone to manage the content, keep track of comments, respond to feedback, etc. Either you have to devote someone’s time to it or you need to pay someone to do it for you.

In social media, figure out success indicators & how you are going to measure them before you do anything. If you don’t, they can change the game on you halfway through. Focus only on a few basic metrics ~3 things. Pick the most important ones to measure success, especially in the beginning. Then start looking at other metrics to figure out where and how to improve.

It’s all about the content. Write really compelling content before worrying about stats, digg, whatever.

Yahoo’s new Shine site for women. Hugely unpopular with the women here. One panelist referred to it as like a car wreck on the side road that is terrible, but you can’t help but take a look on your way by. Women don’t want to feel like they are being targeted to as just women/

Print is being funded by dumb marketing dollars right now, and the move is shifting to searchable content online. Make it easy for people to find the information they are need quickly. Trend is also moving toward video. This doesn’t mean that you want to have everything as video. You want to have video as an option along with written content. This gives people a choice of how they want to receive the information: written or video.

Many others have been blogging about the event in much greater detail for anyone who wants more information.

blogher

BlogHer Recap: Day One

The agenda for the first day has been focused mostly on case studies with people who have been successful using blogs and other social media.

A few interesting takeaways:

  • The kick-off had a bunch of interesting data about women in blogging and social media. Many more details can be found in the presentation.
    • 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogsophere every week (15.1 publishing, 21.1 reading and commenting)?
    • More than half of women maintain the original blog they started
    • 24 percent of women surveyed say we watch less television because we’re blogging. 25 percent of us say we read fewer magazines because we’re blogging. 22 percent of us say we read fewer newspapers because we’re blogging
  • Find sponsors that *add* to your goals. For example, Manic Mommies got GM to sponsor the Mommy Escape by providing something useful for the attendees – transportation to and from various parts of the event. It was a way for GM to be involved without distracting the attendees with sales pitches.
  • Listening is so important. “Participate” in the community by watching and learning first. Once you understand the community and the audience, then you should start contributing in a way that helps to build the relationship. This is especially important in business conversations to avoid coming across as a jerk with a hard sales pitch.
  • Don’t send bloggers press releases and pitches – it is really easy for bloggers to delete those. If you have a relationship with them and you send them a personal email with information that is really useful for them – those are harder to ignore and much better received.

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.