How should I handle my personal and professional blogs?

November 4, 2007 10:28 AM

How should I handle my personal and professional blogs?

I currently have a personal blog. I'm returning to my programming consulting career after a stint in graduate school, and I decided it's finally time to put together a professional website. I'll be including the obligatory blog, and I'm trying to decide how to handle it in the scope of my personal blog.

So here are some criteria:

1) I'm not interested in completely hiding my personal blog from my professional site. I'll probably have a profile page on the pro site linking back to my personal blog. I just don't want the minutiae of my personal blog showing up on the pro site.

2) I would like everything on the pro site to be somehow cross-posted on the personal site. I can overcome any technical limitations of making this happen, I just need to decide on an ideal behavior.

3) Comments are required somewhere. Ideally there would somehow be "one conversation".

Here are the options as I see them:

1) I only post to the personal blog. I tag professional posts and the pro blog watches the personal site and updates itself when it sees a new post tagged as professional. Advantages: I only maintain posts in one place. The pro blog will automatically reflect any changes made to the posts. Disadvantages: the conversation has to be on the personal site. That may be OK.

2) I set up two blogs. I post professional posts to the professional blog and just post a link to the pro blog on my personal site. Advantages: the conversation has to be on the pro site. I think this is preferable. Disadvantages: More maintenance problems with two blogs.

3) Finally, I hack up a system that shows all posts on the personal site, only pro posts on the professional site, and they share a database and a conversation. Advantages: great flexibility. People only interested in pro site never have to leave pro site to participate in conversation. Same for personal site. Disadvantages: lots of upfront work for me.

4) No overlap at all. (This doesn't meet the criteria above). Personal stuff on the personal site ad professional on the professional. I'm just including the option for completeness.

Honestly, none of this really matters, as I have like 6 readers. But for the case of correctness, I'm asking:

My question is, assuming you were interested in what i had to say about my person or profession or both, which of these would be ideal for you? After actually enumerating everything, I'm leaning towards 3 despite the up front work for me.

Has anyone seen this problem solved in an interesting way not mentioned above?

posted by AaRdVarK to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Professional sites are a great marketing tool ... I got most of my work during my freelancing period last year simply by posting heavily on discussion groups and putting my professional blog in my sig. I was turning down jobs on a regular basis.

I would personally go with no overlap at all, honestly. Sure, it's theoretically a pain in the rear, but your target markets are *very* different for your rants blog and your professional technical blog. There's little to no overlap. People either subscribe to your RSS feed because they want to know how you feel about programming, or they subscribe to your rss feed because they want to see cute pictures of your puppy. You shouldn't force one crowd to read the rest unless you're my mother and you subscribe to both of mine.

Plus, it's easier to set up... ;)
posted by SpecialK at 11:01 AM on November 4, 2007 [1 favorite]

For the No#3 option, there's a CMS system, ExpressionEngine, which, has a Multipe Site Manager, which may cover what you need. You can ask specific, pre-sales questions in their pre-sales support forum.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:03 AM on November 4, 2007

I'd recommend #3, and it's not really that much work if you use Wordpress.

There's a great tutorial about using the latest features of Wordpress as a CMS system:

Part I
Part II

Using this technique, you start with your personal blog and then build a second view of your site that only shows the professional content. You can then map a subdir of your site to the pro blog (me.com/pro), or sub-url (pro.me.com), or a seperate URL (me-pro.com).

This would provide personal readers with full pro content and support very easy cross-referencing, you should be able to get something basic up & running in a weekend.

I had thought about doing the same thing myself, but instead decided to run 2 separate sites instead as I didn't see much cross-site interest between my family (personal blog) and friends (geek/tech blog). Pretty much what SpecialK said.
posted by jpeacock at 11:52 AM on November 4, 2007 [3 favorites]