Better Blogging Chronicles 8 - WordPress.com or WordPress.org?

Okay. I've decided what my next step is.

Instead of adulterating this blog with commercial aspiration....I've decided to start a completely new blog/website, one devoted to education.  It just feels wrong to solicit the people who voluntarily endure my BS, my rants, and my thinly-veiled narcissism or the folk who are hopelessly addicted to MM....for money, either directly or indirectly (via ads).  It's almost like I should be paying y'all!

Furthermore, this is essentially a *personal blog* and as a modern day Renaissance man....my keywords are spread too thinly.  Hence my site will forever be penalized by the mother of all web-traffic generators - *search*.

Step One - Choose a name for the new website.

That took me a much longer time than I would have ever thought. And even still I'm not too happy with what I came up with.

Simply picking out a name isn't that hard....it's finding one that you like, that's descriptive, not too long, easy to remember/type, AND hasn't been parked by one of those venture funds out there. See - Domaining Gold.

The name I've got at the moment is a *dashed* version of an existing site (in a different field). Since it was less than a $20 investment and my site is still in the germinal stage, I might very well end up re-naming it again before it's all said and done.

Step Two - Pick a format.

While I've been with Blogger.com for 5+ years and have seen it steadily improve over time, everyone else out there seems to recommend WordPress. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to branch out to another platform and judge for myself.

But DO NOT DO what I did. I went straight to WordPress.com, the free site much like Blogger. I'd seen warnings that WordPress.org (where you have to pay someone else to host the site) was more customizable, more tractable, but figured those were the rantings of very tech savvy geeks.

It turns out, that the free version (.com) won't even allow basic Amazon "iframe" coding. And I sense that it doesn't permit a lot of the standard affiliate ads either.

In other words, WordPress.com is pretty much worthless except for the purely recreational (and cheap) blogger.

I spent considerable time today trying to figure out how to move my blog (and the domain which I bought through WordPress.com) over to WordPress.org. Although I haven't actually migrated the site over yet.

Let me save y'all that time by advising you to NEVER GO NEAR the tantalizing free blog host.

Just pay the whopping $3.95 (?) or so per month upfront to *self-host*. (Of course, hosting wasn't always so cheap....)

So what and where is my new site?

It's TOP SECRET:



Hah! That's just got to be one of the most underrated comedies of the C-Nut era.

Seriously, as I said above, my new site is going to be *educational*, and no doubt many will presume it to focus on homeschooling, which is partially correct, of course. But I have a twist to it that I believe to be somewhat unique that I'd like to keep *under wraps* - lest anyone *head me off at the pass*.

(And how about those two queer expressions I just wielded!)

Also, I'm not sure I want CaptiousNut connected to my new identity. BTW, my wife will technically be a *partner* in this new endeavor. She really, really wants out of the Wall Street grind. Here it is now, 11:14pm on a Thursday night and she's still not home - had to work late and then a mini-tornado in Queens around 6:30 shut down the commuter rail, the Long Island expressway, and a whole lot of other roads (and traffic lights).

Mrs. C-Nut is a work-horse who can definitely help me a ton. But she also brings a female face which is very important - because chicks are sheep. Go scan the homeschool blogs and you'll quickly see their herd-like mentality. If you or a product becomes female-approved....look out for the on-rushing swarm! I'm also yet to see a female with a Droid phone; they all just have to have those pink iPod thingys.

See my index of - Better Blogging Chronicles.