On self-hosting WordPress blogs

A long overdue post on the way I go about blogging. It would be too grandiose to call it a strategy, but actually that’s a reasonable way of describing what I’ve been trying to work out in my mind.

The first thing (as ever with blogging) is context and identity. This “problem” has led me to create different blogs for different purposes. This in itself has caused me problems of identity and of course the targeting of posts to different audiences. [At least in my mind, if not in practice.] This led to a proliferation of blogs on different platforms and a sparsity of posts on nearly all of them :-(. This had to stop!

Some of these issues were also resolved to a large extent by using Google+ and Circles. However the one insurmountable issue appeared to be the spamming of Circles with Public posts – I have come to the realisation that I can’t solve that one without going down the separate identities again, and I’ve come to the conclusion I just can’t do that. I want simplicity, not complexity – so “spamming” it would appear is unavoidable! Actually, it’s not so much spamming as a challenge to me to get people learning a different way of looking at posts :-).

If you think of it, using Google+ is akin to reading a newspaper and absolutely no one reads a whole newspaper from cover to cover … do they? So, I’ll just be sending an explanatory message to my Google+ Circles requesting tolerance and suggesting they just ignore anything that has the word Public after my name :-).

The second issue is where to blog – what platform to use and how to integrate them with social media. For a long time I’ve used Blogger as well as WordPress. That had to stop. The latter is so much a better platform than the former, even if Blogger did integrate so much better with the other Google services. However, WordPress gets better all the time, and in its hosted form the flexibility it offers, and the integration you get by using the Jetpack plugin, creates a platform that is a joy to use. So I decided that my Private (mainly family) blog(s) would remain on Blogger, and so gain from the close integration with Google+, but that my two remaining Public-facing blogs would move to a hosted WordPress platform.

Here I must put in a plug for 5quidhost who (as well as being a UK-based hosting company, which I appreciate and would wish to support in any case) are also incredibly good in their email support and account administration and whose response time for readers in the UK is very good. They have an easily understandable approach to hosting which allows a try-before-you-buy free hosting account before you decide on the scale of hosting you want.

I also would highly recommend DomainMonster for domain registration. Again their dashboard is the easiest to understand of any hosting organisation I’ve seen or used. I moved a number of domains to them from another domain registry a couple of years ago and this went remarkably smoothly. They’ve got a very satisfied customer too!

So, I now have two Public-facing blogs – this one, and one – “Moments like these …” to focus on my photography hobby. They both integrate seamlessly with my social media accounts and I believe now that I’ll be able to keep both reasonably active.

Issues? Well … yes! I thought I’d like to share with you what I’ve learnt from my self-hosting experience. I’ve found that it’s absolutely a time-saver to have a development platform with loads of space that I can have a number of blogs hosted on – as I do authoring and design work for others as well. Using this platform led me to realise a number of things which I wanted to share.

Firstly, store your images off your blog – use flickr, Google+ photos, whatever, and link to them in your posts. This reduces the space used by your blog and therefore the cost of the hosting at very little decrease in the speed of loading a page.

Secondly, be absolutely ruthless in your choice of widgets and plugins. Only use ones that do not impact on the speed of loading a page. Then having made your choice, not only de-activate the plugin but delete it as well – the space and speed you gain by doing this for a number of plugins is remarkable.

Thirdly, only use Responsive themes. There are plenty of them available for free at WordPress.org. Doing this will make the rendering of your posts on mobile devices so much better and easier and the effect is remarkable. It’s like looking at different blogs, every time you look at a post on a different device. Choose the theme that makes your post look best on those multiple platforms.

Fourthly, don’t be scared at the thought of “messing” with your theme. There’s a huge community of wordpress bloggers who will help you create and edit your first child-theme and after that you’ll fly! In fact there’s even a widget or two to help you do the job.

And that’s about it. I hope to have the opportunity to plug (sic) the plugins I’ve found most useful – it may be of use to someone – in a later post. That’s for another day.

Getting Spotify to work for me !!!

Creating a shared Spotify Playlist that I can blog about has taken me much longer than I ever expected or hoped it would. I’ve had to learn a fair bit about sharing music, which I didn’t know anything about, and even more about what you can do with Spotify and how it can be made to work with iTunes. A certain sense of satisfaction at having got it to work, but I’d be the first to say that “there must be a better way” and if anyone can suggest it, I’d be grateful.

You start off with the service that does just what you want it to – create a Playlist and then Share it with whosoever you want to share it with, be it Public, or Limited. That’s fine … there’s a bit of a setback when you realise there’s not an easy way of importing the actual Playlist into a blog, so you have to go back to iTunes (where you created it, before importing the track list into Spotify) and saving that Playlist as a text file. This you then have to edit substantially to get any text for the Blogpost.

Then, the major setback, you find that not all the tracks on the playlist are recognised by Spotify; they are played because Spotify plays them as Local Files, but to get the best experience you then have to go through the ones that don’t have a Spotify existence and find the track manually on Spotify itself. This may be because it’s just got a slightly different name to the track on your Playlist. Bother! That will still leave some that don’t appear on Spotify at all – my opera tracks are a good example. As I said before, they play because they play as Local Files, but that won’t do if you want to create a Blogpost that references ALL the tracks on the Playlist.

So you have to create a Shared Folder that you point your readership to and ask them to download the tracks into their own Local Files folder in Spotify – which they will have have had to install on their local machine; would they bother, I think not.

Having done all of that – which is a lot of work to just read a Blogpost – it does work; but it’s not worth the effort for the Writer or the potential Reader, I’m afraid. The best solution is to “forget” about the missing files, just put it down to “c’est la vie”, share the Playlist on tumblr and enjoy the music. Perhaps reading the Blogpost alongside the tumblr stream playing in the background 🙂