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Thomas Z Lukoma

Migrating from Hostgator to Media Temple

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Ever since I began self-hosting my WordPress sites, I have used Hostgator as my hosting provider. I started out with their Baby plan which was a shared hosting solution when I only had a few sites, then about 9 months ago I moved up to their reseller plan as I was thinking about providing hosting services to some of my clients.  I have been pleased with the value pricing because I don’t have a large budget at the moment, but this week I realized the downside of this solution versus a managed hosting solution when dealing with clients that have a large user base.

Hostgator had a major outage on its reseller servers due to an OS upgrade this week and all their clients that were hosting sites there suddenly lost service.  I found out about this from one of my clients in a polite email where he informed me that the two sites that I host for him were down.  He is in the process of launching a book and his blog and website are a critical component of his marketing campaign – I can imagine having his followers call or text him that his site is down was not a great experience for him.

As bad as it was for me, it was much worse for others:

So to be proactive in case something like this happened again in the future, I researched managed hosting and found what seems to be a pretty good plan with Media Temple’s Premium WordPress Hosting.  You get 3 WordPress installs, 20GB of storage plus lots of other goodies for $29/month.  Additional sites are only $9/month with an extra 5GB of storage.  That’s plenty to work with on most of the sites that I manage.

I won’t be migrating all of my sites to this solution, but for the mission critical sites of paying clients, this is my new solution for a couple of reasons:

  1. This is not (at least yet) my full time gig and its only fair to clients that when there is an issue there is dedicated staff to deal with it
  2. As much as I have learned on the technical side of sys admin type functions with WordPress, the time spent troubleshooting those type of issues (backups, security etc.) detracts from the time I could spend mastering the web design and theme building aspects of the platform – which is where I know my real strengths lie

Since this is a new approach, I decided to first try it out on one of my own sites, so I migrated my main business site over.  There were a few hiccups in the process, but overall it went quite smoothly.  I will have a post later this week about the steps I took and some of the troubleshooting I had to do.

 

To grok or not to grok …

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Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man. – Robert A. Heinlein  via Wikipedia

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For several years, starting with a simple blog on WordPress.com and then hosting my own and other people’s websites, I have grown to have a deep appreciation for the WordPress platform.  Both from the perspective of a publisher, and from a tinkerer who plays around with the backend workings of the platform.  I am now at a point where I know the power of the platform and can perform most of the basic requirements to get a site up and running – but I don’t know enough to have a creative idea and implement that idea from start to finish.

Being able to do that would be my definition of ‘groking’ WordPress – and that is something I would very much love to do.

So, in addition to educating about platforms, this blog is also a place for me to ‘work out loud’ about my journey as I figure my way around WordPress – philosophically, technically and practically.

I think its gonna be fun.

(Image courtesy of Andreas Praefcke)

 

If you want to grow your tribe, free yourself from WordPress.com

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If you want to grow your tribe, migrate your WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted version of WordPress

Hosting a blog with WordPress.com and using the software from WordPress.org to host the blog yourself are not the same thing. This distinction is often confusing.

I am working with a client who is preparing for the launch of his first book and a critical component of his marketing and launch strategy is the community he has built on his blog. The blog was hosted on WordPress.com for over 3 years and had a healthy following of several hundred that received his weekly blog posts and engaged with him on his content.

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In our initial meeting, he explained that he had received feedback from several advisors that he needed to move off WordPress.com and get a self-hosted version of his blog prior to launching the book and significantly growing his tribe.  He understood conceptually that this was important to do, but he wanted me to both outline the benefits clearly and help him to actually implement the migration since this is not an area of expertise for him.

Since setting up an account is free, WordPress.com is a good testing ground if you are trying to determine whether or not you want to publish content on a consistent basis. But once you get the hang of blogging and know that you want to do it consistently, I am a big advocate of switching over to a self-hosted version.  The WordPress.com platform provides a rich set of functionality, but there are some significant limitations which don’t lend themselves well to building a brand and extending your reach with your tribe.

Customization is limited on WordPress.com

Your blog will look like other bloggers hosted on the platform because you are not permitted to install custom themes with the free service.  There are hundreds of themes to choose from on WordPress.com but since the platform has millions of users, there is a good chance that the styling of your blog will look like several other blogs.

With a self-hosted blog, the ‘look and feel’ of your blog is only limited by the capabilities of the person designing the website since you can build a theme from scratch or modify one of the millions of WordPress themes available online.

Functionality is limited too

The open-source version of WordPress has evolved from its initial roots as a blogging software to a full-blown content management system (CMS) that can power major websites for well established brands across a wide variety of industries.  The wide range of capabilities for WordPress as a content management system is primarily provided through the use of plugins.  When you are using the self-hosted version of WordPress, you have access to such a large variety of functionality through these plugins that most of the time if you can think of something you want to accomplish on your website, you can find a plugin that does it.

WordPress.com on the other hand, for security reasons, limits the number of plugins that can be used with their blogs which means that you would not be able to extend the functionality of your site past the handful of plugins that are currently available (for example, you are limited to their site statistics plugin and cannot use Google Analytics).

Your interactions with your tribe are dictated by the WordPress.com platform

The final reason I recommend migrating your site if you are taking the next step and want to grow your tribe is to gain better control over the interactions with that community.  In WordPress.com, you grow your community by getting people to subscribe to your blog (if they are not signed up with WordPress) and to ‘follow’ you (if they are a part of the WordPress.com community).  They then become your ‘subscribers’ and receive a notification every time you publish new content.

You also have the WordPress comments function connected to each article or page that you publish and you can interact directly with your tribe there through discussion threads below your posts.

This set-up works well if the comments and email-each-post functionality is all you need.

But what happens when you want to interact with your tribe via email in a more personal way with content that is not published on your public website or blog?

What if you want to reward people who have shown their commitment to your message by signing up on your site? Maybe you would like to give them sneak previews of an upcoming book or special offers for an event that is not available to casual visitors of your site.

You can’t with WordPress.com.

But you can with a self-hosted version of WordPress.

And that’s just scratching the surface.  Depending on where else you interact with your subscribers outside of your site, you can integrate with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter in several cool and interesting ways.  You can get as creative as you want – because you have the flexibility.

I hope that helps to give you a good understanding of the benefits you can get from migrating to a self-hosted version of WordPress.  My next couple of posts will go into the actual process of migrating from WordPress.com and some of my recent experiences transferring my client’s site this past weekend.

Becoming more efficient as a web designer

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For the past two years I have learned a lot about web design in general and WordPress web design in particular. I demystified HTML and CSS for myself by taking the self-paced courses at Code Academy and then applied what I learned to customize some simple sites.

Through trial and error and a lot of ‘googling’ late into the night, I have taught myself a good amount of web design and WordPress skills.

I learned about the core capabilities of the WordPress CMS by getting a simple hosting account and experimenting.  First by migrating my personal blog from WordPress.com to my own hosting and then offering to take on some family and friends as my first clients.

As I gained more confidence, and my commitment grew, I increased my level of investment beyond just owning a hosting account.

I am now at a place where I have no doubt that I can be an exceptional web designer and a WordPress expert. I know how to get unstuck when I don’t know what I am doing and I have a borderline obsession with figuring out how to make my ideas come to life on the web.

My biggest obstacle is not talent or access to information.

My biggest gap is process.

It takes me too long to go from concept to implementation because I don’t have an orderly approach to my work. At the end of the project I have always produced work that my clients really like but it is sometimes too painful to get to that point.

The “figure-it-out as I go approach” is what has helped me learn as much as I have until now but I think its time to inject a higher level of professionalism and control to my work.

Inspired by Chris Coyier’s exceptional talk below, I realized that what I am missing is my own web design workflow that I can repeat and use to build consistency into my outcomes.

So over the next few months, as I work on my current projects, I will document my best practices on this blog.  I know I still have a long way to go towards my goals as a designer, and I am excited because I know that this particular step is going to completely transform my ability to consistently repeat success.

Madiba

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I remember in my second year of high school in Botswana, we had a history teacher named Mr. Wilson who was determined to help us gain an appreciation for the importance of understanding the past and its impact on the present.  He didn’t want us to just memorize the information for the purpose of passing the tests – he wanted us to care about the content and make it our own.

One of the ways in which he achieved this goal with me was a series he took us through about three historical figures: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.  With each of the figures, he took us through their background, how they rose up in leadership of a movement, the sacrifices they had to make and ultimately, how they changed the world.

I remember reflecting on how interconnected these three historical figures experiences were with each other.  Martin Luther King Jr. was greatly influenced by Gandhi’s ‘non-violent’ approach to protest and the earlier part of Mandela’s leadership applied the same principles.  Prior to his civil rights work in India, Gandhi spent 21 years in South Africa where he developed many of his political views and methods fighting injustices in Mandela’s native land.

All three challenged a ‘status quo’ that at the time seemed insurmountable and ultimately triumphed, not because of their wealth or military power – but because of their strength of conviction which caused a movement of people to rise up that eventually could not be ignored.

Nelson Mandela PosterIn 1989, when we studied these figures, two of them were already dead and the one who was living was still serving an unjust lifetime imprisonment sentence. We did not even know what Nelson Mandela looked like because all the photos released of him at the time were pre-prison.

Our visual image of him was the young man in his 40s with a part in his hair that we saw on all the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ posters.  So we studied him like a ‘past’ figure because we did not know if he would ever be released.

So I remember very vividly the following year when it was announced that he would be released.  Our school came to a standstill as everybody let it sink in – that day no class really studied – we just rejoiced.

And then on the day that he was released, we spent several hours watching a television shot of a gate as we waited for him to emerge.  There were several delays and it only built the anticipation of who he would be after all these years.

Was he a frail old man and a shadow of his former self?

Had he lost his regal stature and magnetic draw because of the unmentionable horrors of imprisonment?

Would he be bitter and seek revenge on his now vanquished tormentors?

Thankfully, the answer to those questions was no, no and absolutely not.  He emerged and lived an amazing ‘second chapter’ to his life that most people could not manage in a single life.  From uniting a country that was on the brink of civil war, to bringing Africa its first World Cup, his imprint has resonated throughout the world over the past two decades.

nelson-jacketEven within my family his impact has been tremendous.  I think this post by my sister this morning gives a very good summary of the breadth of his reach.  I love the picture that she used in her post because I am so thankful that our visual image of him today is that imprint that she used when she designed the jacket – rather than the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ posters we grew up with.

 

 
This post was originally posted in my personal blog @ komasworld.com.

Google Hangout with Sacha Chua

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On Friday I had a Google Hangout session with one of my favorite bloggers, Sacha Chua, who writes the blog “Living an Awesome Life.” This was a new experience for me in reaching out and networking with a fellow writer who I have been following (and admiring) from a distance.  Despite my nervousness prior to the Hangout, it was an awesome experience (pun intended).

A few weeks ago, I made a concious effort to engage more on the places that I have an online presence and so far I have found the experience to be quite rewarding.  Part of that experiment is to actively comment on blogs where the author is covering a topic that I care about and feel that I can contribute to the conversation.

In Sacha’s case, she blogged about some questions she was asking herself about the direction of her blog and I felt that a lot of the issues she was reflecting on were in line with the Platform theme I have this year.  So I wrote a long comment in response to the post and was quite surprised when she offered to do a Skype call or Google Hangout to discuss the topic further.

I did not know what to expect when I joined the Hangout on Friday but she immediately put me at ease with her calm and humble nature.  We covered a wide range of topics at the beginning of the call – from some of the challenges of communicating with family that lives overseas, to how much we both love learning new things.

When we moved into the meat of our conversation, there were three key areas that we covered:

One: How can Sacha reach more people while staying true to her ‘brand’?

A consistent theme that emerged while talking with Sacha (and something that I share with her) was her desire to remain authentic to her ‘true self’ through the process of building out her platform.  For her, building her platform is not about fame or increased profits.  She genuinely loves sharing with people about things she learns and helping those people ‘live an awesome life’ in whatever way that means for them.  She has a good income from her offlilne consulting work and doesn’t feel the need to focus on monetizing.

Although she is already very active on the main social networks and has a pretty good following that she shares her thoughts, ideas and help with, I recommended Michael Hyatt’s book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World as good reading for thinking about all of the aspects involved in building out a platform.  The book has a lot of focus on building a platform to mass and monetizing it – two things that I know are not focuses for Sacha right now – but I thought the framework he provides would be a good template to use.

Two: What type of things make sense for Sacha to ‘package’ from the topics she covers in her blog posts?

In addition to the book suggestion, my personal recommendation for Sacha on how to reach more people was that she looks for ways to ‘package’ some of her content into ‘bite size pieces’ that people who are not blog readers could consume and still get the ‘essense of Sacha’.  Some of the work she does with Sketchnoting is an excellent example of this and she has already had a very positive reaction to one of the topics she has started packaging in that way.

In addition to sketchnotes, I suggested she consider creating free ebooks on some of the other areas she consistently covers on her blog like ‘The Quantified Self‘ and her ‘5 Year Experiment‘.

Three: How can Sacha help people who are starting out or trying to be more consistent writers / bloggers?

The last topic we spent a lot of time on was sort of a ‘therapy session’ for me.  Sacha asked how she can help people like myself who are either starting out with blogging or desire to become more consistent in their writing.  My honest answer was that I didn’t know what would help since I was still trying to work it out for myself.

We spent a long time talking about what we both agreed was the root cause of a lot of the main struggles in becoming more consistent (The Resistance) and something Sacha said stuck with me and I think will help me going forward. I asked her how she keeps to such a prolific posting schedule and whether she ever feels a pressure that she is going to let her readers down if she doesn’t post.

Her answer was that she would be letting herself down.

In addition to a forum for sharing, Sacha really sees her blog as a holding place for her thoughts because she doesn’t ‘trust her memory’ and because she sees the blog that way, regardless of whether or not somebody reads a post she puts up, she continues to write because it helps her work through her thoughts and organize them.  This perspective on the process of blogging is very freeing because it helps me to avoid some of the second-guessing and perfectionism that makes me inconsistent.

As a practical follow-up to our discussion, Sacha is going to pilot a Google Hangout session in mid-June and I agreed to participate as one of her ‘guinea pigs’.  I am looking forward to that session and using it as motivation to get back on a consistent schedule so that I have some good questions for her during that talk.

 

This post was originally posted on my personal blog @ komasworld.com