This Blogsite -- Any good? Other choices? Which one to use?

[Dr. Drib]

A writer whom I deeply admire - Robert Freeman Wexler - has a blog site over at WordPress.com. Here's his link:

http://robertfreemanwexler.com/

Does anyone know, from examining his site, if this is the Free, Premium, or Business choice he's made?

I'm not at all familiar with blog sites.

Perhaps you know of one that is better suited for promoting one's writings?

[PeterT]

Since he has a custom URL (http://robertfreemanwexler.com/) it can't be a free site; it has to be premium or business.

He's using one of the basic themes so that doesn't help distinguish between premium or business, but I really doubt that he (or you) would need eCommerce support so I expect it's premium.

[Dr. Drib]

Thank you, Peter.

---- Is this a pretty good site to use, do you think? Are there better sites?

I like the uncluttered look of his site.

[arjaybe]

Wexler is not using the WordPress blog site. He's using WordPress on his own independently hosted website. Another example of that is mine, which you can check out by rolling over my sig. The uncluttered look you like is due to the theme he's using. There are others to choose from. It's okay to do it this way, but it takes more work than it would to open a free site on wordpress.com. There they take care of all the hard stuff and leave you with some configuration options. As I understand it, they have a premium option as well, but I don't know what the differences are.

[Dr. Drib]

What is required, then, to use one's own independently hosted website. (Apologies, but this is all new to me.)

I basically want a place to promote my writing, and post my thoughts on writers and writing.

I would like to have links available to the places where the writing can be either downloaded or available for purchase.

[ATDrake]

How complicated do you want your interface with the site to be?

If you're happy with static HTML pages that you update manually, then all you need is a place that will host them for for a minor cost, and your own domain name, I suppose.

Personally, I'd recommend 1&1 for that: they have an Instant Domain package that's included in all their domain name purchases and gives you 2GB of email storage, along with 100 MB of webspace for as long as your domain registration stays with them. I use that myself for my email. (Disclaimer: they technically have a referral program for their customers to bring them new customers, but I've no idea how it works and as far as I can tell, that's a clean link I've put up, or you can try browsing directly from the front of their site: 1&1 Internet Services. If anyone does want to try the referral thing if they're moved to choose 1&1, please PM me.)

If you want to run your own WordPress or other content management system so you don't have to create and update your pages manually, you'll need a host that will allow you to use CGI/PHP/other scripting whatnot, and will also allow you to do it for a low price.

For this, I personally recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which has an excellent pay-as-you-go plan which charges you for storage, server processes, and bandwidth used as you use it (you do have to deposit in advance) rather than at a fixed monthly rate. If you're not anticipating high traffic to your site, then this is very cheap indeed (and if you are, they have some kind of tie-in redirect option which let you link to external money-saving things like Amazon Web Services for your file-hosting, IIRC), and you can probably run your site for a year on what another place would charge you for a single month.

Again, I use them myself, and they're quite good and have very reasonable policies regarding usage (including as regards to free speech, responses to DMCA complaints, and hosting adult content, for those who might need a service provider who can do such) and have a comprehensive FAQ and helpful advice/help Forum where the members are really good at answering people's questions (both only available to view once you're signed up though, or I'd link them: here's the admin blog so you can see a bit of what they're like).

If you're not quite up to setting a WordPress install up yourself, you can still use their free version and do all the stuff you mention above, as in addition to the regularly-updated blog function, WP lets you host downloadable files and set up static non-blog pages which you can put in the frontpage sidebar as links to permanent resources (as well as actual links).

It would probably be a good way to practice and get used to using it, and one of the advantages of WP.com vs Blogspot is that it's relatively easy to back up and move one's WP.com site over to one's own hosted install, once you're ready to do that.

Hope this helps.

[Dr. Drib]

Thank you, everyone.

It seems that the easiest way to get an introduction to all of this would be to go with the free service from Wordpress.com., which would give me a way to promote my ebooks and also just do some blogging.

Correct?

And then, as my knowledge increases, I would have new options available to me to choose from.

[arjaybe]

That looks good to me. I can comfortably recommend WP.

[Dr. Drib]

Thanks to all who responded with their thoughts and recommendations.

I'll keep reading more, when/if additional posts are made.

[crich70]

You want to make sure of what their rules are about free sites before you do too much. I know some free website services don't like people to promote or sell things on their sites. Back when I had webtv I had a free webpage and I inquired about putting some samples of flash fictions I'd written up as a sample of my writing for later promotion and they replied that they would rather I didn't use the free site in that way. Better to make sure than to find oneself in some legal trouble over such.

[Dr. Drib]

Using Wordpress seems to be the way to go, but I'm now confused about whether to have a blog or a webpage.

Additionally, I seem to be a bit confused about the availability of having both at Wordpress.

I know the differences between the two, but can one have both services available at the same time? And are both free? (There's a free blog choice, but I wasn't able to determine if there's a free website choice.)

Could someone here go into further details, please, on these two?

[arjaybe]

With WordPress, they're the same thing. It's blogging software and website creation software, so you get a website on which you can blog. As far as I know, it's free unless you opt for the "premium" features.

[icedtea]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Using Wordpress seems to be the way to go, but I'm now confused about whether to have a blog or a webpage.

Read posts versus pages. As mentioned, you can do both.

It sounds like you want a writing/author site/blog? So you can have traditional pages (about, book 1, etc.) and put your 'blog' content as posts. If you are structuring your site around pages, you can link the 'blog' content under the custom menu using a category or tag.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Wexler is not using the WordPress blog site. He's using WordPress on his own independently hosted website.

Sorry mate... he IS using wordpress.com and not his own site.

tracert robertfreemanwexler.com

Tracing route to robertfreemanwexler.com [76.74.255.123]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  ROUTER [192.168.2.1]
  2     9 ms     8 ms     8 ms  7.11.160.125
  3    12 ms    11 ms    13 ms  209.148.245.97
  4    10 ms    19 ms    19 ms  24.153.5.217
  5     9 ms     6 ms    10 ms  209.148.224.254
  6    18 ms     8 ms     7 ms  216.187.64.65
  7     8 ms     8 ms    10 ms  10ge.xe-0-0-0.tor-fr709-cor-1.peer1.net [216.187.113.129]
  8    21 ms    19 ms    20 ms  10ge.xe-2-0-0.chi-eqx-dis-1.peer1.net [216.187.114.37]
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12    52 ms    54 ms    51 ms  wordpress.com [76.74.255.123]

[Jessica Lares]

Yeah, he is using WordPress.com, says so at the bottom of the page. He's just using the custom domain option.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/

Some people like to have a welcome page and have their blog on a different page. I'm not sure how easy it is to do that on WordPress.com (or if it's even possible), but it's easily doable on a self-hosted install.

It's basically duplicating the index page, adding a comment saying that you want it to be known as "Whatever", in this case "Blog", and then making a page with that template. Then you change the front page to "static" in the settings and choose the welcome page. You cannot do this with WordPress.com, not even with the paid plans.

For self-hosted, you want a domain, and then a web hosting provider. Here are the requirements to run WordPress:

https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/

PHP version 5.2.4 or greater (recommended: PHP 5.4 or greater)
MySQL version 5.0 or greater (recommended: MySQL 5.5 or greater)

And then mod_rewrite is recommended.

Some hosts will have something like CPanel or DirectAdmin that lets you install it with one click.