Beth Granter

Freelance digital consultant for charities


Hosting my own blog


So I just copied my blog over to bethgranter.com/blog/ just to see if I could, and so I could have a go at using WordPress for a CMS so I know how to do it for clients.  It was pretty successful and now I’ll be able to edit the CSS to my liking, although I do rather like the Unsleepable theme as it stands.  Anyway, the biggest hassle has been moving across all my widgets and I still haven’t finished doing that.  Other than that, very nice and easy.  I’ve even set up a bunch of pages to hold all the information I did have on my standalone site, e.g. the content from bethgranter.com/illustration is now a page under bethgranter.com/blog (I realise I could have done this here too).  So now I have a couple of dilemmas.  This blog as it stands has quite good Google ranking and about 25 readers a day.  What do I do now?  Should I post something here that says there won’t be any more posts and just tell everyone to go over to my bethgranter.com site for new content?  Or forget my new URL and leave my content as it is, hosted by WordPress?  And what about old posts here?  They are linked to from all over the place so I don’t want to delete them.  But should I turn off comments so i don’t end up with lots of new comments on this blog and other new comments on the bethgranter.com one?  I am confused.


7 responses to “Hosting my own blog”

  1. If you ever need a great web hosting company, we can highly recommend Server Intellect… they are completely professional and see that everything is taken care of.

  2. Thanks for the advice. Apparently wordpress don’t offer redirects but they do offer domain mapping, but that’s not what I want because that just changes the URL apparently and the stuff is still hosted by WordPress. And they charge for domain mapping too.

    So I wouldn’t be able to mess with the templates. Thing is, I really like this template as it stands, so maybe it doesn’t matter that I haven’t made it – I’ve done lots of other design stuff so why redesign the wheel? I just wanted to integrate the other pages from bethgranter.com with my blog better, to give my artwork more exposure I guess, and I can do this by adding pages here. I can keep bethgranter.com to use as a central home, and maybe even just put a redirect FROM bethgranter.com TO here. I think that’s better than confusing all my traffic (most of it comes from search engine results, and I don’t think THAT many people are subscribed at the moment, but I’m guessing…).

    Actually, is there a way to tell who has / how many people have subscribed to the RSS feed of this blog?

    I guess this is a lesson learnt – installing WordPress on your own website is really easy so if anybody is starting a new blog that they expect to go anywhere, if you will ever want to change the templates, host it yourself!

  3. I *think* you can do a redirect from WordPress.com.

    Another thing you should do is set up a Feedburner account and have a dedicated feed. The big advantage of this is being able to change the feed location (whilst keeping your readers) for situations like you are facing now.

    Either way, I’m presuming you’ll have a new RSS feed location, which *I* would probably mention as a blog post (or two – for those that don’t get around to updating it).

  4. Ideally, you’d want to have a HTTP Response 301, “Moved permanently” with the new URL. That’d forward all traffic as well keep your Google rank. How you do that on WordPress I’ve no idea.

    Maybe you can trick WordPress: if you tell it to move your blog to bethgranter.com does it put redirects in for you from bethgranter.wordpress.com? If so, tell it that, and never *actually* use WordPress to host it, then the traffic is on your server, at that point you do with it as you want.

  5. its a common issue actually and lot of people have problem moving blog to a different host. this is an article that might be able to help you. you also can contact your current host who would be able to give you some guidance as well.

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