I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now, but I’m now hosting several different sites under this same WordPress MU installation. In addition to the freepressblog.org ones (mine and Martha’s), I recently added a couple other sites (other domains, hosted using the same WP installation): one for Martha’s school and the other for our latest foray into the land of podcasting.
All that to say that if anyone is looking for a place to host their blog, you’re welcome to do it here for free (friends only, non-commercial, normal traffic blogs of course).
The benefits would be that you would always be running in an up to date WPMu installation (similar to what you’d have if you signed up for a wordpress.com account), but with a bit more flexibility in terms of available themes, plugins, etc., as well as being able to pick your own name.
You can have whatever.freepressblog.org, or just use your own domain name that you’ve already bought but don’t want to pay for web hosting for, and you can have the whole scope of *.yourdomain.com to set up multiple blogs under.
The only drawbacks would be that I can be a bit picky about installing themes or plugins (I would have to review and approve them first), and I wouldn’t allow certain types of advertising or other monetization methods that I deem inappropriate (TLA, pay per post, etc.)
Not trying to make any money or anything, just throwing it out there in case it might be useful to anyone.
2 Comments
So why no TLA advertising?
I should clarify that I’m referring to TLA the company, specifically, as well as any other company that follows their same business model, based on allowing advertisers to buy PageRank.
Here’s some posts I’ve made in the past about why I stopped using TLA:
1. Goodbye Text Link Ads
2. More TLA trouble
3. TLA - beginning of the end
In summary, I don’t think it’s an ethical advertising model, although that issue is debatable and depends on one’s point of view. Secondarily, though, whether it’s ethical or not, Google is now actively penalizing sites that use this type of advertising, so that’s reason enough not to use it, if nothing else.
The terminology is a bit confusing, because there are also legitimate “text link” ads, which contain the “nofollow” attribute and therefore are not designed to sell PageRank. Google itself sells ads this way, and I have no problem with those.