You’ll notice things have been a bit, um, stagnant around here. The design hasn’t changed in over a year, I haven’t offered much shoe news, and, well, I only post maybe twice a month.
It’s time for a change. I’m finding that the platform that I’m using is too limiting – monetization is frowned upon, customization is only available for an extra charge (and monetization is still frowned upon even then).
If I’m going to keep this up, I need to get something out of it that I’m not getting via Flickr, Facebook or other social media. I’d like to either brush up on my coding skills or make a little extra cash – or better yet, both!
So, I think I might move, either to another host that comes with more freedom, or (eek!) to hosting my own.
Fellow blogistas – what would you do? What do you do?
October 31, 2009 at 9:22 am
I’d go with hosted wordpress. You already know the platform, and all you’ll lose by going self-hosted is the stats (which you can get from your host, though they won’t look the same). You’ll gain all the extras you need without having to learn new software.
November 1, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I like Dreamhost for self-hosted WordPress.
November 2, 2009 at 11:15 am
I’m probably the lone “host my own with movable type” vote up there. It definitely works for me, but I don’t think wordpress was around when I made that decision, and I haven’t wanted to deal with switching. My host provides stats, but I also have google analytics set up which gives some pretty thorough info.
November 2, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Looks like WordPress is definitely getting a lot of love vs. Movable Type. True, I think they weren’t around back when you started your site.
November 2, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Well, I use blogger because it is an easy solution. I don’t really want to do that much with my blog, so I don’t need much in the way of features. I use one of these sitemeter.com links for statistics.
I will say that there is one technical thing I find annoying (sorry!) about your blog. When I click on a link to somewhere else that you have referenced, it still shows chezshoes.com on the browser url, so I cannot just bookmark the new page I’ve been sent to. Sometimes are your links are worth bookmarking!
November 2, 2009 at 5:56 pm
That’s weird – I think it has something to do with the workaround I used to set up my redirect from wordpress.com to chezshoes.com (since if I did this the standard way, WordPress would want to charge me!). If you access my blog or subscribe to my feed via chezshoes.wordpress.com, rather than just chezshoes.com, the links work the way you would expect them to.
Thanks for pointing that out!