To Host or Not to Host

Somewhere in my peripatetic reading of the past day I found an interesting article on Better Business Blogging which discusses the advantages and disadvantages of hosting a blog on your own web site or on an external one. The issues are discussed very clearly in the article, and the clear conclusion is that if the blog is intended to promote your business interests, it makes sense to host it in a subdirectory of your own web site.

Other information on that blog pointed me to various tools such as Wordpress for installing and hosting a blog on my own site. After some initial hassles with database and user names for the MySQL connection (which were not properly documented or whose solution required ignoring the instructions), I was in fact able to get a prototype up and running.

Now an obvious question in my situation is why I would want to operate a second blog? At first I had no intention of doing so; I was merely interested in the technical challenge. My free time is very limited and the idea of maintaining two parallel resources of the same basic type is not appealing. There would have to be a very good reason for doing so.

With a little reflection, I realized that I do in fact have a good reason for a second, separate web log. Not the usual "personal" versus "business" separation (I've never been very good at separating those spheres in any sense). I have quite a few customers and colleagues who lack either confidence or competence in English (or both) who often ask if the information I publish on translation workflows, etc. is available in German. The answer is usually "no", because since I quit working in-house at German companies I chose to be lazy and write most instructions in English, using the excuse of the wider audience for that language. So when I get the technical details of that other blog sorted out to my satisfaction, it will be in German and focus on publishing in German much of the same information and tools I have created for the other world. Since business has always been good I've never gotten around to creating an web presence for the company in German (rather silly since we are located in Germany!), so this will be the first. Stay tuned for more information....