Thoughts on hosted vs roll-your-own weblogs

Big news in my life this week: I finally completed the written work for my masters degree in Educational Leadership. It’s been a long time coming and I was really up against the wire to get it done. Because time was so short, I “handed it in” via the internet. The final project was 43 different pieces of written work and I wrote them all in a weblog tool and the teacher will read and assess them online. (As an educational technology geek, I think that’s pretty cool, but that’s for another post.)

The point here is that I needed to get this stuff up online ASAP and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time dicking around with server software, so I set up a quick tumblr and started writing. It worked great, except that I wasn’t posting the assignments in order and tumblr only shows your posts in standard blog order (reverse-chronological). Now, there are ways to change that order through the creation of a custom template but since the whole benefit of using a service like tumblr is quick and easy setup, that seemed dumb.

But, I was stuck. You see, each post was named something like “3: Brushing you teeth” or “7: Making coffee” (as if I was getting a masters degree in morning routines) and I wanted to reorder them alphabetically so they would show up in proper order. But, in tumblr, that simply wasn’t possible.

So, what did I do? (After spending over an hour researching all the ways it might work on tumblr before deciding that it wouldn’t?) I hopped over to my personal domain at DreamHost, did a one-click install of WordPress into a brand-new sub-domain and, in less that 15 minutes, I was up and running. I found a great theme, researched, discovered and installed the two plugins I needed to make the site work the way I wanted it to (This one to order posts and this one to build an index of posts) and imported all of the posts I had exported from the tumblr.

It was, quite literally, a 15 minute process and then I was good to go, on my own server, working just the way I wanted it to.

With that in mind, why on earth would I use a hosted solution like tumblr or posterous or even wordpress.com?

I can only think of two reasons, money and brain-space.

Money first. I spend $9/month with DreamHost, for unlimited everything. That’s really not very much money in the grand scheme of things. I love DreamHost (and, if you click here and sign up for hosting, I get paid enourmous referral fees).

The other reason why something like tumblr or posterous makes sense is brain-space, meaning that it takes almost no thought to set up and manage. All you do is write. Hell, this very website is a tumblr… sometimes it’s not worth the 15 minutes.

But, if you need any sort of customization and you have 15 minutes and $120/year, then the decision is easy: roll-your-own.