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Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider

wordpressOver the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server.  Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results.  We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

  • WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
  • Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
  • Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
  • Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
  • Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

  • Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
  • No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
  • No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
  • Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains.  They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
  • Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality).  But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it.  We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com?  What are your thoughts?  If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?

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TwitScoop for News & Business Intelligence

twitscooplogo2Want to know what’s hot on Twitter right now?  TwitScoop gives you a quick snapshot of the top words in a tag cloud that updates every 20 seconds.  Hover over any of the words to get a view of the last 5 tweets with that word highlighted.  Click on a word to get a graph of its usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  If you see an interesting tag cloud, click the “Tweet this cloud” button to save a snapshot of the page,  with the option to send a link to Twitter (its kind of like freezing time).  Here’s a link to the snapshot I saved of the twitter cloud.  A widget is also available to add the hot trends tag cloud to your blog or website. Or subscribe to TwitScoop on Twitter to be updated with links to top events.

For more in depth results, choose a keyword or username to search for.  Twitscoop will give you an overview of the tweets which you can click on to get more details – the last 20 tweets with the keyword highlighted and a graph of the usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  If there are new results, Twitscoop will periodically update the page with a reminder to refresh to see new results (which doesn’t interupt your current research). Click the “Tweet these results” button to save your results, giving you a link or an option to send a link to Twitter.  For examples, this is a link to the results for “social” that I just investigated.

TwitScoop is good tool to get a quick view of what’s going on or for research into what has been said about a certain topic (if it was within 3 days).  Unlike TweetScan, there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to results for periodic updates, but TwitScoop’s graphing capabilities can give you good information of how a topic is trending.

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TweetScan for Business Intelligence

tweetscanlogoTwitter can be a powerful tool for getting your message out, but it also can become part of your business intelligence arsenal.  TweetScan can help you keep track of what is being said about your company and products and get updates via email, rss or on their website. You can scan up to five phrases for daily or weekly delivery.  Best of all, there are no ads or spam in the emails. It also can be used to check for lost replies and direct messages. TweetScan’s homepage has a keyword cloud representing hot topics on Twitter.  You can also search for specific keywords by particular users.

Using TweetScan for business intelligence may take a bit of experimentation.  Obvious keywords are your twitter username, company name and any brand names for products or services.  Less obvious keywords are those which may represent hot topics in your particular industry.  For those, try looking at industry blogs, forums and publications to see what’s hot and then use the TweetScan search functionality to see what people are saying about it.

Obviously this type of business intelligence works best if your industry has a large number of Twitter users.  But it can still be useful for keeping track of general industry topics.  Twitter’s usage is also growing fairly quickly since it easy to tweet from mobile phones, browsers and desktop applications.  From a business intelligence standpoint, it is a rich environment for research because Twitter users tend to be actively engaged in the community (even if they are only broadcasting and not interacting).

If you use Twitter for Business, please share in the comments how you keep track of conversations and important topics.

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