Roll your own blog

This is my first post exclusive to this version of the blog! I also blog at Vox.

I started this blogging experiment just a few days ago. I wanted to get something going quick so I went the blog farm route. I tried LiveJournal, WordPress, and Vox. The first two were trying so hard to sell upgrades. I went with Vox which was pretty cool. I think it’s ad-supported, but, being an Adblock Plus user, I didn’t have to worry about that. I liked the selection of themes, and their community is really great. I did, however, notice some problems. Text colors are persistent for the remainder of the post after you have colored even just one word, and it doesn’t matter if the word is in the middle of your post so far. All the text you add after coloring some will retain that color. There’s no way to remove text formatting which would have been an easy fix for the aforementioned problem. Phantom spacing between paragraphs and at the end of the post often manifests upon editing. The sidebar widgets cannot be rearranged. It’s nothing major… just a lot of minor annoyances.

I decided to try to host my own. I signed up for an account with DreamHost. I get hosting and a domain for a year for about $25. You’ll get that price, too, using the link I provided. I gave you the maximum discount which means I get nothing for referring you. They have WordPress, a blogging engine, available as a one-click install. I initiated the install, and, about 5 minutes later, I got an e-mail notifying me that the install was complete. I’m now writing you on my WordPress blog tricked out with lots of extensions to add functionality. I’m really impressed with this platform. I’m not running into any of the seemingly arbitrary limitations I had from Vox.

I have to admit, though, that I miss the social features of Vox. I wish there was something that would let me have the social network but bring my own blog. I love the groups where I can cross-post my articles to people who may be interested. This blog is pretty eclectic. It may be difficult to find a singular audience, but I think there are a number of audiences who might enjoy parts of it. If anyone out there knows of any such blogging community, I would love to hear from you in the comments.
I’m in the process of manually migrating my posts from Vox to here. You’ll see more of those popping up over the next day or two. Once that’s done, I’ll start posting new posts. They’ll probably be cross-posted to Vox, too, until I find a viable alternative.

Thanks for reading. I’m certainly no expert, but feel free to post a comment if you need any help with getting a blog started. I’d love to hear from you.