Blog Tips

Once upon a time, wandering through the forest of nonprofit blogs, I stumbled upon a blog, managed by a team based here in Rome. Over the past years, I got to know most of the people involved, as a bunch of great individuals, driven by enthusiasm and passion about their cause: the ICT-KM team at the CGIAR – the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The ICTKM team at CGIAR

The ICT-KM team recently revamped their blog, and merged it with their website. The outcome was a sparkling new blog. I wanted to know more. Time for a talk with two of the ICT-KM members: Antonella Pastore and Enrica Porcari. An interview which touched on many issues dear to our heart: “What are the benefits of social media to nonprofit organisations?”, “What motivates people to blog?”, “Migrating a blog from one platform to another”, “the difference between blogs and traditional Content Management Systems”, “Blog traffic and the importance of good content”…

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Selfhosting a blog is like building your own house

In a previous post I touched on the subject of selfhosting in a series about selecting the blog platform suited for your needs. The subject is important enough to elaborate a bit more.

When you start a blog, you have the choice of either using your blogservice to host your blog, or to rent server space yourself. Of the popular blog softwares, WordPress.org and Movable Type allow you to use your own server. Others, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger and Typepad don’t give you that option, and will run your blog on their servers.

Intuitively, organisations, and the more “independent minded” bloggers would be inclined to choose for selfhosting, but the choice often is made uninformed. Let me share some of my personal experiences.

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Alright! You recognized your organisation can benefit from a blog and you know what you will blog about. The next step is critical: Choosing your blog platform, the “software” to edit, publish and host your blog.

Choosing the right blog platform is critical. You might set out as “let me give this a decent try”, but once you made your choice, moving from one blog software service to the other is an absolute drag, as we will cover more in depth further down in this post.

Comparing blog platforms

The most popular blogging platforms are:

• Blogger, owned by Google
• The WordPress duo: WordPress.com (hosted by them) and WordPress.org (selfhosted)
• Tumblr
• The Six Apart duo: Typepad (hosted by them) and Movable Type (selfhosted).
  They also offer the lesser known VOX, a free blogging platform.

Each of the blog platforms has specific pro’s and con’s. It is difficult to find a single article covering an unbiased, comprehensive and objective comparison covering all features, ease of use, flexibility, cost, support and technical limitations.

In this series, we have turned it around: We started from you, the non-profit organisation, narrowing down the options you have, based on the 5 most critical questions you need to ask yourself:

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After reading Part 1 in this series, you will agree with me that selecting the right blog platform, the software you will use to create and maintain your blog, is critical. Which of the four platforms we are considering will it be? WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad – Movable Type or Blogger?

Your right selection will be based on a set of criteria, partially technical, partially functional. In this post, we tackle one issue which is a combination of both: Selfhost or not, that is the question.

“Hosting” is the mechanism to store your blogposts (and eventually also the pictures, videos), and the blog software package.
By “Selfhosting” we mean: you store all data and software on your own server.
“Blog service hosting” is where your blog platform does that for you.

When you start a blog, you have two basic options: Either have the blog service “host” your blog or “selfhost”. This choice will determine which blog platform you can use.

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Part 1 of this series showed how critical it is to choose the blog platform suited for your needs, before you start.
in Part 2, we covered one of the first questions you need to ask yourself: will I selfhost my blog or not?

Today, we’re covering a topic which is just as critical in deciding which blog software to use: “What will you do with your blog?”. Or even better: “What do you want your blog to do for you?”.

Are you OK with a basic functionality, concentrating on posting text, pictures, video? Are simple standard templates and widgets all you want? Or are you looking for more versatile functions?

Let’s go over the different blog platforms we are covering in this series: Tumblr, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type and WordPress.

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