Saturday 26 April 2014

Thinking about moving my blog...

Over the Christmas break I moved my website that sat on a Google sites page to my own server and did this mainly to learn Django. I'm now really happy with my personal site (modulo css which I'll fix when I have time) and like the workflow involved with updating the underlying database and the templates taking care of everything (a lot of my students in particular have commented on the ease of access to teaching resources on there).

I'm thinking of moving this blog over there too.

The way I see it there are good points and bad points to this.

Here is how I see the bad points:

  • It'll be 'hard': blogger just takes care of everything for me.
  • I have a modest number of readers and it would be a shame to 'lose' them.
  • Disqus.com comments are great but I'm a huge +Google+ fan and like the interaction I get on comments with the +Blogger / G+ thing.
Here is how I see the good points:
  • It'll be 'hard': I have a slight addiction to putting myself out of my comfort zone so learning how to set up my own RSS feed (which in practice should take 20 minutes of googling) would be good fun. A part from that it will actually be very easy.
  • I'll have more control: I've had issues with +MathJax not playing nice with +Blogger so if it's all on my server I won't have these problems.
  • I'll prefer the workflow: at the moment I write my posts in markdown, pandoc them and then copy the html and fix it in +Blogger. With my own site, posting will be a simple git push away...
On reflection I think the only real bad side would be through potential loss of interaction / engagement but I also think that by simple sharing on Twitter and G+ not much would be lost.

Perhaps I'm wrong, if anyone has moved their blog and could offer me some advice that would be great. Also, how important is the RSS feed nowadays (personally most of the blogs I read get pushed to me by social networks and/or Google Now - I wonder how many people wouldn't have read this if it hadn't gotten to them via RSS)?

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