A Stitch in Time Saves Nine

Exciting news, healthy bloggers! I'm sure by now you know Alison from Mama's Weeds, who brings us all the great Health Bloggers Dish interviews that make our Mondays just a little better. Who am I kidding, you probably found this blog through one of those interviews! I'm extremely happy to announce that Alison is now a "full-timer" at Health Blog Helper, so she'll be posting regularly here from now on.  Alison is just as interested as I am in constantly learning to make our blogs better (and less time-consuming), so the way I see it, Health Blog Helper just got twice as good!  (And don't worry, the interviews will keep coming.)  Without further ado, here's Alison!

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A stitch in time saves nine. What does that phrase really mean? Saves nine what? Saves nine stitches? Saves nine minutes? Nine hours?

While I've gotten a myriad of explanations on this proverb from my good friend Google, the basic idea is that a little time spent on something now can actually save you more time down the road.

Blogging Takes Time

Many blogs in the healthy living niche contain a lot of photos per post. If you take the "what I ate today" or the "here's how to cook this" approach to your healthy living blog, you could easily have 5 to 10 photos in any given post.  If, like me, your typical post contains a lot of photos, adding images to a post could take up a relatively large percentage of your time spent blogging.  If you blog daily or even multiple times a day, being time efficient is essential!

When I started Mama's Weeds about 6 months ago, I was already using flickr to share photos of our daughters with family and friends. Given I was very familiar with flickr when I started the blog, I continued to use flickr to upload images for blog posts.

Flickr allowed me the ability to post a lot of nice sized photos on the blog pretty easily, without worrying about exceeding the wordpress.com space allocated to me from my free wordpress account. I liked too that all of my photos stored online were in one location and I didn't have to worry about remembering what photos were here and what photos were there out in cyberspace.

The downside to this approach is that it was time consuming. Copying and pasting the flickr generated html into my wordpress posts meant a lot of steps going back and forth between the two sites. After a few weeks of doing this twice a day, I had a little system in place and could do it pretty quickly – but I had a feeling there was a better way.

Self-Hosting Can Be Your Stitch in Time

Five months into my blogging career I moved my free wordpress.com version of Mama's Weeds to some new self-hosted digs. Self-hosting was something I'd thought about from the conception of the blog, but I wasn't sure I wanted to invest the time or money into my "hobby" before I knew that I was really cut out to be a blogger or not.

There's no question though that self-hosted blogs stand out from the variety of free blogging platforms out there. You can tell who has a lot of flexibility and control over what goes on behind the scenes of their site and who has the same capabilities as everyone else.

So while I was convinced self-hosting my own blog was worth it, taking the time to do it was something else.

The timing of Matt's post on self-hosting could not have been more perfect and was the final kick in the pants I needed to make the move. I set aside a weekend to devote my complete attention to the move and when I finally flipped the switch it went off without a hitch. Yes, I had to invest some time and money into the project, but it was worth it.

Mama's Weeds – self hosted!  I did it!  At first, day to day life with the blog in its new home was pretty much the same. Posting took the same amount of time, everything looked and felt just as it did before. I dabbled a little bit with uploading images to my server, but it didn't seem any better or faster than using flickr. I liked having all my pictures all in one place so I stayed the course.

Saving Nine

I recently had a blog breakthrough when I found a plugin for flickr that connects my flickr account to wordpress and allows me to access my images uploaded to flickr directly from the post editor. With the click of a newly installed button, the pics I want to appear in my post show up instantly, instead of using multiple tabs, lots of clicking, copying, pasting and back and forth nonsense between flickr and wordpress like I'd been doing all along. This plugin has easily saved me hours of time spent on the blog per week!

While this example is pretty specific to me and my blog, it can still apply to you and your blog. Maybe the way you upload images is speedy and doesn't take much time at all.  But when you're self-hosted, you have the freedom to install features that are specific to you and your style of blogging. You have more options available to you that can save you a lot of time and effort. It allows you enhance your blog in new ways and to start thinking outside the box. Whether you decide to go with Bluehost like Matt recommends or any other hosting company you have confidence in, you can free yourself of  the cookie-cutter setup and restraints laid down by the blogger man.

Of course, these free accounts have their place and have a lot of nice features available. The free account can allow you to dabble in the land of blogging. But if you consider yourself a serious blogger or dream of becoming one – self-hosting is your ticket to finding your unique blogging style and identity, and would very likely save you time down the road.

Self-hosting has absolutely afforded me a lot of blog freedom. Right now I'm tickled that one little plugin has cut my time spent blogging by practically 40 percent. I wouldn't have been able to install this plugin to my free account.   Thanks to a few days and dollars making the self hosted switch, I'm easily saving more time than I spent on the move to begin with and now have more time to spend working to make my blog better – looking for more plugins, tweaking my theme and layout, working on SEO, not to mention more time for running, cooking, mothering and writing ridiculous content for Mama's Weeds.

Thanks to my flickr plugin time savings, I've got a little time left over in the day to work with my friend Matt here and write for Health Blog Helper!  In a sense, self hosting has opened new doors and opportunities for me as well!  Might self-hosting be a stitch in time for you too?