You may have noticed some changes around here this week.  I’ve been on a mission to streamline my business and work smarter, not harder!

Last Friday, one of my clients and friends, Zach Even-esh, challenged me to rethink my blogging practices.  Those of you that know me, know that I’m a serial blogger.  I have started (and more often than not, abandoned) more than a dozen blogs in the last five years.  When WordPress issued their Daily Post Challenge, I committed to posting on my three favorite blogs every week.

And I did! I blogged regularly during the month of January and doubled the traffic to each of my blogs. Woot, woot!

Anyway, Zach and I were tweeting back and forth last week and I mentioned that I maintain three active blogs and Zach pointed out that it’s tough to maintain multiple blogs and to keep followers engaged. He also reminded me that having multiple blogs can potentially confuse followers. He suggested combining them “or peeps wont know where 2 findU”

And that got me thinking.

So I turned to my go-to technical expert, Franco Frenette (yes even a techie gal like me needs someone higher up on the techie scale to show her a few tricks) and asked him what the best way to combine the different blogs would be.

He advised

Since The WP project and WPMU project merged now, if you upgrade to latest version of WP if you have already, then you can just turn on the multi site feature. So you can just login the main wp admin area and be able to control both blogs / sites without having to login 2 different areas.

Say what? Okay someone else to challenge my brain.

I knew I had the latest version of WordPress installed so I turned to my good friend Google to help me figure it out.

WordPress MultiSite Feature

WordPress MultiSite is an interesting feature. It allows you to create multiple sites within a single WordPress install. Each site can have its own plugins, themes and content. So instead of having to register several different hosting accounts and install WordPress on each of them, you install it once, on one domain and then set up your other sites as part of the same network of blogs.

It sounded like what I needed so I followed the installation instructions on WordPress and activated the Network.

Then things got tricky. It gave me an step to follow that I didn’t quite know how to execute. And it was approaching 3 PM on Friday afternoon and the big Digital Cleanse experiment was fast approaching.

So I flubbed my way through the instructions and surprise, surprise, it didn’t work.

No worries. I back-tracked all my changes, confirmed that my blog was up and running and grumpily logged off for the weekend.

Uh oh, Better Call Franco!

Monday morning rolls around and I create my weekly blog post, and the blog… breaks! The only post that was visible was my recent post. Uh-oh, now what? I knew I could always call Franco and have him fix everything for me. He’d even install the multisite feature and migrate the blogs I wanted moved over. But I wouldn’t be much of a techie girl if I didn’t at least try to figure it out on my own.

Several hours later, I have my main WordPress install setup as a MultiSite host and have configured and installed several sites. It wasn’t that complicated once I sat down and dedicated my full attention to the project. The only reason why it took hours to complete was that I decided to make some tweaks and additions to the different blogs as I went along. Nothing like a good bit of remodeling when you’re already under the hood.

A Work In Progress

I’ve decided to stop tweaking for now and play with the changes for the next little while. The blogs are still separate entities on the same server but from a management perspective, I only need to log into one dashboard in order to access all my blogs.

I’m still thinking about the original challenge that Zach issued, to combine them and not “be afraid to add some cooking stuff to your marketing blog… let marketers see you are real! U can make Twitter Pancakes, Facebook French Fries or whatever! FUN Blogs is what peeps LOVE!”

I’ll sit with that for a while. In the meantime, I’m doing a little happy dance for having taken action quickly and an even bigger happy dance that it lead to learning some new skills.

It may have been the day the blogging died, but it was also a nice day to start again 🙂

iChat: Share Your Thoughts

  • Do you have trusted advisors, colleagues or friends who challenge your thinking and help you grow your skills?
  • Will the multisite turn out to be a time saving feature or just the latest geek obsession?

Let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.  And if you have any feedback to share on the changes, feel free to share!