Some technical questions I’m considering before shifting to wordpress.org

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  elche48 · Member · May 18, 2009 at 4:14 am

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  Hello everyone,

  I am one of a number of students involved in running a blog we have set up for a campaign we’ve started to defend academic freedom at our campus.

  We quite like our blog, and a number of people have worked hard on it are proud of their work. However, we were considering shifting to the wordpress.org blog in order to take advantage of a few features we currently cannot use on the free wordpress.com blog, namely:

  1) adding a “share this” button to make it that much easier for people reading our blog to share info they’ve read on the blog.
  2) setting up a listserve that we manage
  3) establishing an RSS feed.

  However, I realize that the shift will entail some money, contracting a company for webhosting, technical know-how, and familiarity with the wordpress.org software, all of which we’re currently working on raising/acquiring.

  In the meanwhile, and in order to evaluate whether the shift is worth our various resources, we wanted to ask a few questions, which I would like to put out:

  1) does the wordpress.org software support multiple-users? part of the success of our efforts and the blog is that we’ve delegated responsibilities to different members of our committee, which allows them to work on the blog at their own time and pace. the current wordpress.com blog we have grants us that sort of accessibility that makes our shared responsibility method work. would we lose that accessibility if we shift to the wordpress.org software? would everyone need to own the software and know how to use it in order to make edits, create new pages and posts? if the shift to the wordpress.org software would compromise this accessibility, we might not make the shift.

  2) how easy to use is the wordpress.org software? right now, the wordpress.com blog is fairly easy to use for us, but I’m not sure we all have the time to learn a complicated piece of software, nor do we have the kind of luxury to have just one or two well-versed blog software point persons carry the load.

  3) any pointers when shopping for webhosting? we had our name published in foxnews.com, and sure enough, we had a spike in hits. I understand that if our webhost doesn’t have a robust capacity to manage such spikes in visits, the blog may collapse…

  In any case, I hope this reaches you well and I thank you in advance for your help!

  Cesar “El Che” Rodriguez

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  raincoaster · Member · May 18, 2009 at 4:20 am

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  Before you move, you’d probably do best to familiarize yourself more with the software here.

  You already have an RSS feed; all WordPress.com blogs have an RSS feed.

  You can use many AddThis-like options on WordPress.com, including GetSocial and AddThis itself in your sidebar. http://faq.wordpress.com/?s=Addthis

  As for your specific questions:

  1) Yes
  2) Easy to use as Wp.com, not so easy as WP.COM to upgrade and maintain.
  3) I suggest if you’re looking for web hosting advice, you look at WordPress.org’s forums. By definition, everyone here is hosted by WordPress.com.

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  t3ck · Member · May 18, 2009 at 4:41 am

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  Here is the Get Social Tutorial I wrote up last year. Written Tutorial/Video Tutorial

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  elche48 · Member · May 28, 2009 at 1:44 am

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  thanks folks! i was able to use the get social bar through hilel stoler! frickin’ sweet!