Ohmystinkinheck

Free, web-hosted blogs like Blogger, Wordpress.com, LiveJournal, and TypePad have their place and are a painless and easy way for anyone to quickly begin self-publishing on the world wide web.

However, if you’ve ever had an itch do do just a little more → perhaps you’ve made some modifications to your current template, added a blogroll, a few buttons, or even a flickr badge to your sidebar(s), then it might be time to move beyond free blogging tools to something you can fully customize.

Now is as good a time as ever to ditch your blogging training wheels and start riding with the bigger kids on the block.

At Blogher ‘07, Jessica and I walked several bloggers through the process of leaving their comfortable, but limited, web-hosted blogs during our lab segment, Taking your Blog to the Next Level. As Jessica said then, “Several of these bloggers walked away with a grown-up, shiny new blog at their own domain!” and we were really excited to watch those new blogs take off in the community and really gain speed.

Now, the same break-out session taught at Blogher ‘07 is available via the links below. If you are already using WordPress as your blogging platform, I’ll be getting back into the swing of WordPress Wednesdays again really soon - love to have you along for that road trip.

Taking your Self-Hosted Blog to a New Level

A lab segment from Blogher 2007: Transitioning to a self-hosted blog (Intermediate)

• How to purchase your own domain name
• How to purchase web hosting
• Defining DNS, what is it and why do you need to know?
• Setting up WordPress using cPanel and Fantastico.
• Setting up Domain Re-Directs to your new weblog.

Permanent + Linkage = PERMALINKAGE