Wriging

School is the only thing taking aways from my content, but I don't really design my blogs I use standard themes mucked slightly in the case of me personal blog.

My Darfur blog is not self hosted, and it is more of a pain in the neck than the two which are self hosted.

If you are design obsessive and are always pulled toward redoing something I can see where it might be an issue, but having had a blogger blog at one point, and one wordpress.com blog currently, I think you would dislike it immensely.

Sure it does, but I like to program and design so I don't think it's such a bad thing.

Plus I think the ability to muck around and tinker with the backend sometimes fuels some content and allows you to write things in a structure that you couldn't do with a total-prefab solution.

Actually...not for me.

Switching to self hosting spurred my interest in blogging and in some ways improved my content. Because I spent more time looking around for theme inspiration, solutions and interacting with other people.

Eventually I found some good blogs with good content that I read which in turn gave me inspiration for good content to write. Also, I think it depends on what kind of content you're keeping.

Save for myself, I can understand how the constant maintenance can take you away from personal blogging, but for people who are into the design field or web programmers, I would think that it would encourage them to have more things to blog about as they experiment with various designs.

Though I am interested to know Gnorb, what kind of problems are you having with your self host that is taking you away from writing on your blog? I mean, I have over 50 plugins and a theme I designed and built myself. Yet, it doesn't take me away from my life or what I write.

For me, it adds to my content. Since I focus on design, web development, technology, etc., when I'm messing around with the inner workings of my blog it's giving me things to write about.

I'll confess I've spent a fair amount of time customizing my blog. Wordpress themes from scratch, my own plugins, fixing other's plugins, making it all work together...

But that was really only at the start. Nowadays I only have to do any work if I want to change the design or add something. If I wasn't hosting it, I'd have to do that same work--or go without adding or changing something.

So, no. I don't think it does. While I do want to take the time to write more entries, I think my current site is rich and nice. Couldn't have gotten it the way it is on some hosts.

Nope, not here... in fact NOT being able to access every nook and cranny of my blog seems to have an effect on my content.

Being a designer, I find it's harder for me to be inspired when I know what I'm writing isn't being presented in a... well for lack of a better word, a "presentable" manner.

If I can't stand the look, I can't seem to write.

I tried a blogger blog for a month once and wrote three posts and they got ZERO attention because frankly, they sucked and I had zero drive to improve them.

Self-hosting my blog doesn't take focus away from the content now, but it used to. When I first went to self-hosting on a former blog of mine, I spent 95% of my time messing around with code, themes, etc., 5% on actually writing posts. I've gotten much better about tinkering with all of that stuff, and only do it until I'm mostly happy, and then I walk away from it. (I say "mostly" happy, because if I strove for complete satisfaction, I'd never write anything. Ever.)

Would I give up self-hosting now? Probably not. System 13 started on WordPress.com, and I quickly ran into wanting to add stuff to my site that WP.com just wouldn't do. This didn't happen often, but when it did, it was frustrating to realize that, no, there really wasn't any way to do it. One issue I recall is I wanted to include some of my books from LibraryThing in my sidebar; the widget script was JavaScript, which wasn't allowed on WP.com, and so no LT widget.

Ironically, now that I've been self-hosted for good while and can do mostly as I please, there are no LT books in my sidebar. Go figure. ;) Still, though - the very fact that I know I can put them back in if I want is comforting, in a geeky sort of way.

In short: self-hosting can take focus away from your content if you let it. Set limits to yourself; if you're digging through code for 15 hours a week and writing for 15 minutes, it's probably time to shout "stop this!" From the viewpoint of a reader of your site, Gnorb, you being self-hosted hasn't affected much; I love your posts.

I'd say that self hosting forces me to work on my content. Because, you know, you're paying for for your platform, so you'd might as well make the best of it.

I think it has affected my content in a couple different ways. Some good, some bad. When I first started blogging, I was really focused on content and trying to write the best stuff I could because I didn't have a very impressive layout or really helpful plugins.

Once I switched to my own webspace, I was able to cover a little bit more ground by getting a decent layout and some great plugins to help both myself and my readers. However, getting to the point where I was happy with my layout and the overall setup of my blog was the part that really took a toll on my content as I would go a couple days (I was posting at least once a day if not more) without posting anything so that I could focus on my layout.

Now, with my layout complete, I can focus on writing better content. Soooo yes, self-hosting did, at one point, take away from my content.

I'd have to agree with Themikehaynes, in the beginning it was tough and it did take away from my content development, but after it was set up, I was able to put more into my content... it actually gave me the drive to put more into the content... I was happy with the design and layout, I wanted to share it with the world and I understood that the best way to do this was to really write great content.

I agree with what everyone else has said, I'm not the best blogger in the world...but in my times using blogger, things were frustrating when I couldn't get it all to look exactly like I wanted, and with it being ALL html based having to wait for everything to reupload for simple changes got frustrating...I have used wordpress off and on for probably 4 or so years for different things, and it has always worked like I wanted. I am just now trying to get back into blogging though and all the plug-ins have become a bit overwhelming.