Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
For a personal blog, a blog for a hobby, or a blog for an interest group, this is not necessarily a bad
thing. If you're an enthusiastic WordPress user who wants to encourage others to blog along with
you, along with the other specific interests you're blogging about, having WordPress in your
domain name is actually a good thing.
There's no harm in deciding for the long term—it doesn't have to be forever—to begin with and
keep a domain name in the
blogname
.wordpress.com format. Once you make this decision, the
blogname
part of the domain name becomes rather important.
WordPress.com has literally millions of blogs. Once someone starts their blog with a given
blog-
name
, they keep
blogname
forever, even if they later upgrade to a custom domain name or stop
using their account. So you need to choose your
blogname
carefully. It sets your blog apart, and
must be unique. It's also your first choice for a custom domain name if, somewhere down the road,
you do decide to make the move away from a WordPress.com domain name.
You might want to try your ideas for
blogname
out before you start the sign-up process for your
WordPress account. Just start up a Web browser and enter
blogname
.wordpress.com as the domain
name. See if it takes you to a live site or to a message that the domain name is not found. If the
domain name is not found, you should be able to sign up for it during the WordPress sign-up, and
you'll be off and running, with an important decision already made.
What's the Worst That Can Happen?
Domain name pirates are called that because they use dubious tactics to get money or Internet
traffic—which they can use to make money—away from what might be seen as the legitimate own-
ers. If your WordPress blog starts to take off, you might want to consider registering one or more
relevant domain names as a defensive move, even if you don't intend to rename your blog.
Let's say you create a wonderful blog called alaskapolitix.wordpress.com, attracting every web
user in Alaska and millions of other people as well. People start visiting several times a day, taking
your updates as an RSS feed, and your posts attract scores of thoughtfully written comments.
Do you think some domain name pirate, seeing this, might just register the domain name
www.alaskapolitix.com, closing off that growth path to you—and attracting traffic that legitimately
should be yours? You betcha.
Signing Up
Although WordPress makes it easy to add other authors to your blog, if you're creating a blog that
will be a group effort, you might want to let other people use your username and password in some
kind of a pinch. So consider creating a username and password that you don't mind sharing with
someone else if some kind of minor blogging emergency occurs.
If you want updates from the blog to go to a group of people, consider setting up a custom email
address that you can automatically forward to a group of people concerned with the blog. If you're
doing this for work, school, or some other organization, do it in such a way that you can comfortably
hand it off to someone else when you're canned promoted from your job or when you are expelled
graduate from your school.
