Is there a community for self-hosted bloggers?

July 18, 2007 2:13 PM

BlogFilter: I found the blogfarms too confining for my blog, but I miss the social features. Is there any way to duplicate this for my self-hosted blog?

I tried several blogfarms: Wordpress, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Vox. I ended up choosing Vox and started blogging. Then I found their system was quirky. There were some post editing bugs and some features that seemed obvious but just weren't there. Now, I've purchased hosting and setup my own blog with WordPress. I'm very happy with the WordPress Engine, but I miss the social aspects of the Vox site. In particular, I liked the interest groups. I could join and then cross-post a blog entry to an applicable interest groups to get it out there in front of the people who might enjoy reading it. Is there any community site which would provide these types of features but let me bring my own blog? I'm not much interested in the straight-up social networking sites like myspace and facebook unless that's the best option. Is there something targeted to bloggers?

I should also mention that this is a personal blog.

posted by raddevon to computers & internet (10 comments total)

9rules. But your blog would have to be about something. A personal blog with random ramblings would not fit.
posted by Webbster at 2:27 PM on July 18, 2007

Webbster: That definitely disqualifies my blog unfortunately. It's a really nice site, though.
posted by raddevon at 2:50 PM on July 18, 2007

There's a plugin for Movable Type which lets you cross-post to a Vox or LiveJournal blog. So you could host your own and still participate in those conversations. MT's downloadable for free and can import your current blog if you want.

(n.b. I work with the teams that make MT, Vox, and LJ, but I'm recommending this because I do the same myself.)
posted by anildash at 3:52 PM on July 18, 2007

I much prefer WordPress to MT (sorry, Anil) and there are crossposters from WP into darn near everything.

wordpress-to-vox crossposter

I have no direct experience with that one, although I use the LiveJournal x-poster and it works pretty well.

That said, cross posting doesn't really solve the problems you were talking about entirely.
posted by toomuchpete at 4:16 PM on July 18, 2007

toomuchpete: Thanks for the link. I might use that as a last resort.
posted by raddevon at 4:26 PM on July 18, 2007

I hang around on LiveJournal a lot for the community atmosphere (and for reading friends' LJs). I don't actually use my own LiveJournal much - I just join communities and read my Friends page.
posted by srah at 7:57 PM on July 18, 2007

If you're using Wordpress, then I find that using plugins to re-post my blog content to community places like LiveJournal, Blogger and Vox tend to help.

I use DJ Email Publish to syndicate my blog content via email to Vox, Blogger and LJ, while LJ Crossposter is a slightly neater solution.
posted by electriccynic at 2:41 AM on July 19, 2007

Wow. You guys are coming up with some really cool stuff. Thanks to everyone.

I ran across this:
http://www.blogexplosion.com/
posted by raddevon at 7:10 AM on July 19, 2007

Linkified
http://www.blogexplosion.com
posted by raddevon at 7:11 AM on July 19, 2007

Actually, it looks like Blog Explosion is more of a link exchange than a community.
posted by raddevon at 8:59 AM on July 19, 2007