Yesterday, Ti asked me what moving to self-hosting entailed.  I answered her with a long, rambling email, which she then suggested I post.  So apologies for the rambliness, but it was a very long, very involved (4-day) weekend.  Also, keep in mind that I moved from Blogger, so I also had to adapt to Wordpress. And sorry for my exuberence with the parentheses…I kind of approached my response like I approached my move.

My response to Ti:

If you use a simple theme and don’t want a lot of customization, it shouldn’t be that bad.

But.  I like to play with the coding (which can be dangerous, because I don’t really know what I’m doing)…which is how I get my custom background and header and colors.  So I spent at least a day finding a theme that would allow me to make the changes I wanted.

Then I had some bugs I had to figure out how to fix.  My feed was wonky…I spent yesterday working on that.  My sidebar disappeared to the bottom for awhile (but only on certain posts)…that took Sunday to resolve.

Plus, I already had my domain name and was using it, so there was that.  I think I did things backwards.  Because as soon as I linked my domain name to my web host people were seeing the Wordpress blog as I went from theme to theme to theme to design to design to design.

There’s got to be a good order to do things in, I’m just not sure what.  I’m guessing…

-Buy a domain name.

-Figure out who you will self-host through, and set up that account.  You might be able to get the domain name through your web host.  I already had my name through Google.  And my web host is Bluehost.  That was actually easy.  Bluehost has lots of tutorials.  Set up Wordpress through bluehost (or whatever host you choose).

-Import your blog to Wordpress.  This actually was really easy for me, but I know bethany had issues, and a few other people.

-Find a theme that works (there are literally hundreds…and if you just set up Wordpress, you can’t use them all…you have to self-host or upgrade to get into the good stuff.  But if you Google Wordpress themes you can see how they look (but not necessarily how they will perform for your blog)).  Tinker with it.  Tinker with it some more.  Add widgets.  Add plugins.  Figure out how it all works.  Delete plugins.  Add more plugins.  You get the picture…  I’m picky…I knew I wanted the navigation bar under my header, the background color of the comments to match my blog.  It’s the stuff like this that took me HOURS to figure out.  If you stick with a theme with a white background, life will be SO much easier.

-Let people know you moved and pray they update their feed reader.

If I had it to do over again I would have done some research before diving in.  As in, what I needed from a theme, what features I wanted to focus on (are threaded comments important to you? how many columns do you want?), what I wanted my blog to look like (as in will you need a custom header, background images, what hex colors do you want to use), is it possible to redirect feeds, how am I going to let people know I moved…  Also, I think I’d ask people what problems they had and how they resolved them.  So you know what to avoid, or what you might encounter.  I did so much by trial and error I don’t think I could explain what all I did.  I just kept Googling error messages and problems until I found something that worked.

I do like my blog and how it works (especially the threaded comments…I hated blogger’s pop-up window!), although I haven’t checked all my past posts…I’m sure there are some issues lurking.  And I still have to finish the sidebar.  But would I recommend self-hosting?  I’m not sure.  It’s a lot of work (plus about $100 for the domain name and the web host).  I think you need to block out time to do it (or pay someone and hope they get right…evidently that doesn’t always work out well for people either).

I think it’s much easier for people already on Wordpress to self-host.   For us blogger people…not so easy.  I’d quiz former blogger-bloggers and see what other people say.

So there you have it.  My experiences all jumbled together.  I would highly suggest polling others before making the move and getting a list of problems that you might encounter, as well as a list of people that might be able to help you work through them.

Also, I discovered today that my blog displays a slight gap between the header and the body on certain versions of certain browsers.  So now I have that thought lurking in my head and bugging me.  It’s seemingly never-ending.

Do you have anything you’d like to add about moving to a self-hosted blog?  Any tips or warnings or corrections to my ramblings?

And my sidebars.  But hopefully not my posts, which should be loading as I type.

You see, I decided to make the move to self-hosting, totally forgetting we’re in the midst of BBAW judging.  Ooops.  And that it’s the middle of the work week and I don’t have time for all the necessary remodeling work.

So yeah.  Welcome to the new blog.  Which pretty much looks like crap at the moment.

If you want to see what I used to look like, please visit my old blog. 

And yes, I am sitting here kicking myself for my spontaneity.

It’s time to answer another question.

Beastmomma asked: I am having lots of challenges with my blog administrator, so I am curious about the experience of others. How did you chose blogspot? What do you enjoy about this administrator? What would you change? Would you recommend to a friend?

I’ve blogged on LiveJournal, blogger and WordPress (briefly).

LiveJournal was my first experience with a blog. I think I blogged over there for about two years. I joined with a bunch of BookCrossers, so I had a set of friends. It was easy to use, and very easy to personalize your blog’s template. But, it’s also very cliquish. LiveJournal allows you to assign friend status, and to limit access to your blog to those same friends. If someone de-friends someone, suddenly it’s like being back in high school. My blog on LiveJournal was pretty much a conversation with those people I knew from BookCrossing and who I had assigned friend status.

I’ve been on blogger for a couple of years, too. I started my current blog because I had a few friends who blogged on blogger and it was easier to communicate back and forth with blogger, as opposed to blogger-LiveJournal. As far as templates go, if you want to personalize the look of your blog, you need to be willing to mess around with html and devote some serious time it. At least for me, because blogger doesn’t always respond the way I want. Especially with posting. Writing a post is easy. Inserting a picture is easy. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why my spacing goes all wonky on occasion. I am constantly editing my posts to get the spacing between paragraphs to appear uniform (and I like my posts to be visually appealing, not all haphazard looking…if this one looks weird, I’m blaming it on the auto-publish feature). Blogger has a nasty habit of deleting or inserting spaces. Sometimes I feel like it’s an ongoing war over who really controls my blog. Despite that quirky little issue, I’m happy with blogger. Especially since it is free.

I posted book reviews to a group blog on WordPress for a few months. I experienced formatting issues there, too. And I had a heck of a time with pictures, for some reason. But that could be because it was different than blogger. And LiveJournal. I know the cool kids (Lisa and Trish and chartroose) are on WordPress, so maybe they’ll weigh in.

What do you all think? Anyone have anything to add for beastmomma?