I’ve been blogging on this domain since 2004 on various topics ranging from technical to personal and everything in between. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking that I’m not really meeting anyones reading needs, as the content on the site flip flops between technical and personal so often; such that people that only want technical are forced to filter out the personal fluff and visa versa.
To solve that problem, I had a couple of different options available:
- separate the current site in halves using a category, such as personal and technical
- move the technical content onto a subdomain, such as http://technical.lattimore.id.au
- move the technical content onto a completely different domain
I currently make fairly extensive use of categories within the site to organise my posts. I could have gone through and uncategorised the current posts and placed each post back into one of the two new categories or sections. To help with searching or stepping through the site, tagging all of the existing posts would have aided in that area. While it would have worked, it didn’t feel right to inject ‘useless’ categories into the mix to solve the problem.
Option number two would require multiple WordPress installations. There is nothing wrong with that and it’ll obviously work just fine on a technical level but without a little bit of upfront work, seemed as though it’d end in tears some point down the road.
In the end, I chose door number three and set about finding a new domain name that fit the bill. I wanted something that had a clearly technical inclination and after using a handy domain utility, couldn’t believe my luck when I found that ifdebug.com was available.
At the moment, I’m undecided as to what I’ll do with the existing content on the site. I’m inclined to just leave it here as it’s the simplest option, however there are benefits to moving it over to if debug; we’ll see how it pans out.
In the meantime, expect a steady stream of personal content to be published through this site and the technical goodies to land on ifdebug.com.
Believe it or not, I came across your blog for the first time today and found your post quite relevant to my current situation. I am starting a website with WordPress and am having some trouble deciding on how to organize it. I have installed WordPress in a subdirectory called info and am using this as a static site. However, I also wanted to install WordPress in a second directory to use as a blog. So I would have two WordPress installations in two separate directories. Since there is nothing on my root directory, I had to insert a 301 redirect which sends you to my WordPress subdirectory info. When I did this, however, the blog directory was no longer accessible as it kept redirecting to the info directory. Any thoughts would be welcome.
Just a thought Al…… Why separate? Isn’t a blog about you? You are a mixture of personal and technical. I know the technical side makes my head hurt but Andrew reads it all. I can understand if you are separating the technical for professional reasons. Just a thought……… I am really just avoiding housework while Benjamin is sleeping. His first tooth is sooooo close!!! Belinda
Belinda,
I recognise that people wear many hats often, which is fine. In the case of this site, I felt that by combining the technical and personal in some sort of strange mashup; I wasn’t really serving anyone all that well.
Your comment has proven my point to some extent, you aren’t interested in the technical but Andrew is. At which point, when you view the site – the technical posts are nothing but an obstacle.
I’m thinking of including the posts from each site on the other, but in a manner that won’t intrude into the general reading/viewing of either site. As an example, while viewing this site – I might display a list of the last five things I’ve written on ifdebug.com and visa versa.
Al.
I am not sure if I would start a new blog. If you categorize everything effectively and people aren’t interested in your non-technical posts they can just subscribe to your categories which are of a technical nature.
As Belinda says blogs are supposed to have a personal touch and are actually meant to be more effective that way.
Just my opinion,
Tara.