How To Blog

Starting a new blog? Get your own domain name! Do NOT use a subdomain of typepad.com, wordpress.com, blogspot.com (etc)

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So, you want to start a new blog. Maybe you don’t have much experience with blogging, so you don’t think it’s that big of a deal which platform you choose or whether you have your own domain name. Well think again.

Don’t fall trap to the disaster that I landed myself in, where I started casually blogging and ended up regularly blogging and hating the platform I was using but can’t easily switch because I stupidly put my blog on a subdomain of typepad (http://blogging.typepad.com)

Now I’m at TypePad’s mercy. They own my ass because they own my address - even though I’m paying $150+ a year for their service. The same could happen to you whether it’s a subdomain on typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com.

By not having your own domain name, if you ever decide to move to another blogging platform you run the risk of losing all (or a lot) of your traffic, your search engine rankings, all of your hard earned incoming links, etc because you cannot take your URL with you.

How are you going to redirect your traffic to your new blog when you have NO ability to, say, set up a 301 Permanent Redirect? Which, for those who are wondering, would both:

• automatically redirects human visitors to your new blog site
• tells the search engines that your blog has permanently moved and gives it the new location

(BTW - has any TypePad user (whose blog address was a subdomain) had a high traffic blog with a lot of backlinks into it that they then moved to a WordPress blog hosted on their own server? Please tell me what your experience was, whether you lost pagerank, traffic, search engine rankings, etc!!!)

Domain names are cheap - about $9 a year for a single one, as low as $6.75 a year if you own more than 50. There is NO excuse to not have your own domain name for your blog. You will regret if at some point down the road if you don’t start out with your own domain name.

www.GoDaddy.com is the site that I use to register my domain names, although there are numerous other options such as $5.99 Domain Names at 1&1, and, if you only need a single domain name the cheapiest option is domain names from Yahoo! for only $2.99.

The irony here is that I actually own a lot of domain names and I genuinely can’t fathom why I didn’t just use a domain of my own when I started this blog. Don’t make the same mistake as me or you could end up feeling trapped like I do right now. Consider yourselves warned.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my point is that you need to own your own domain name so the URL for your blog points to a domain you own and control. It’s okay to use a subdomain off a domain that you own, but not one that belongs to someone else such as that of a hosted service like typepad.com.

Furthermore, I don't actually hate TypePad itself - there are truly many things about it as a blogging platform that I love.  What I despise is how poorly TypePad handles comment and trackback spam, which forced me to disable trackbacks because I was getting hundreds of trackback spams a day (much of which was obscene) and didn't have time to wade through them all - but in disabling trackbacks I'm removing one of the features that is at the heart of blogging and thus particially crippling my blog.  I want to be able to have trackbacks on for all of my posts without spending exhorbitant amounts of time dealing with spam every day.  I also have to moderate all of the comments on this blog because of the spam it gets (although not nearly as bad as the trackback spam) and that's a bummer, too - genuine comments don't appear immediately on my blog as a result (and due to the migraines I've been having lately, I haven't always been able to approve the comments in a timely manner).  The difference with WordPress is that it's plugins can tell which comments and trackbacks are likely spam and hold those comments/trackbacks (and ONLY those ones) in the moderation queue, while publishing everything else immediately if you so desire (which I do).  From what I've heard, MovableType (which is owned by Six Apart and is what TypePad is based off of) also has plugins that handle spam management well, so I don't get why they haven't utilized these plugins to handle the massive spam problem on TypePad.

And it’s okay to use a hosted solution - just make sure you pick one that allows you to use your own domain name and always reference your blog’s URL w/your own domain so that if you ever decide you want to go elsewhere, at least you’ll be able to take your traffic with you. Right now, the only hosted solutions that allow you to use your own domain are TypePad and Blogger (supposedly wordpress.com will down the line (possibly for a fee) but as of now there's no support for this).

Also of note if you're going to go the hosted blogging solution route: it’s also a good idea to check to see if whatever blogging platform you start with has the ability to export your posts (and comments/trackbacks) for easiest porting of your site to another platform down the road. As of this writing, TypePad is the only hosted system that with this functionality. Blogger doesn't have an export post function, but provides these instructions for backing up your Blogger blog (don't know if that file would then be importable into another blog system, though). While WordPress.com does not have an export function, it will let you import items from another blogging platform - but it's a one way ticket.

For full disclosure, links to TypePad are affiliate links (but as this post shows, just because I'm posting affiliate links doesn't mean I present biased info)

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Reviews, SEO, TypePad, Weblogs, WordPress, Domain names, Domains, Subdomain, Blogging, Blogs, URLs, URIs

More complaints about TypePad's TrackBack system's handling of spam - cannot ban by IP address

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In my continuing rant on TypePad’s horrifically poor system for managing comment and trackback spam, I wanted to post the following complaint:

Why is it that we are unable to ban trackbacks based on a specific IP address the same way we can with comments?  Why is it that when viewing trackbacks through the TypePad Control Panel, we cannot even see the IP address of the offending spammer?  I know TypePad has this information because every time it sends me an email letting me know about a new trackback that has been submitted, it includes the IP address that the TrackBack was sent from.

So what gives?  Here I am manually deleting tons of spam from the same bunch of jerks, all because TypePad hasn’t implemented a simple ban trackbacks based on IP option?

(And all of you spammers — don’t bother.  All you’re doing is aggravating the crap out of me, but your comment and trackback spam will never see the light of day on my blog.  Everything is moderated – do you see any spam on here?  No.  SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!)

technorati tags: trackback, spam, trackbacks, trackback+spam

I'm still experiencing problems with trackbacks in WordPress 2.0.1

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So far I've only had the opportunity to test how WordPress 2.0.1 handles sending of automatic trackbacks (in the Options|Discussion tab, we’re presented with a checkbox that
says, “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows
down posting.)”

What that means is that for any article linked to in a particular
post, wordpress should automatically be sending a ping to alert that
article that you’ve written about them, saving you the time of having
to manually paste their trackback URI into the Trackbacks section of
the Write Post screen.

On what was initially my WP 2.0 Test blog (and which is now my WP 2.0.1 Test Blog), I had reported that in WordPress 2.0, the only blogs that seemed to receive these automatic trackback pings were other WordPress 2.0 blogs.

I had hoped that these problems would be resolved in
WordPress 2.0.1, but instead they seem to have worsened, with even more
erratic results than before:

• again, no trackback pings to WordPress 1.5.x blogs or TypePad blogs got sent
• again, the only time WP properly sent a single ping to a referenced post was when it was pinging the same version of wordpress, this time from v2.0.1 to v2.0.1
• duplicate pings were sent to WordPress 2.0 blogs that were referenced in a wordpress 2.0.1 post, AND
• duplicate pings were also sent to wordpress.com blogs that were referenced in a wordpress 2.0.1 post - making you look like a spammer

What a bummer.

Technorati Tags: wordpress 2.0.1, wordpress problems, trackbacks, pings