Hooray!  I have just migrated my Wordpress blog from the public hosting on Wordpress.com to self-hosting on Dreamhost.  A simple announcement would do, but as I put fingers to keyboard I found myself challenging my motives.

Why should I go to the trouble and cost of self-hosting my blog?

The reasons we givef for self-hosting a blog are usually technical.  We can control our themes; we can get better technical information from Google Analytics; and we can add advertisements. 

But none of the reasons tell us why?

Novice to expert . . . autonomy to competence to interaction

After a ponder, I think blogging is a good example of any skill.  At first, we focus solely on what we have to do. 

We jump in and are delighted that it is easy to set up and start blogging. And it is free. Great.

Once we get into it, we find there is a lot more to learn.  We realize readers won't come unless we make it easy for them to find us, and we start to dig into the skills of copy writing and search engine optimization.

And then the day comes that our traffic is respectable, our pagerank or our Alexa Ranking is better than our benchmarks, and our attention shifts from what we do to whom we do it with.  We've reached the magical point when our work is no longer about us.  It is about our readers.  More and more our blog posts are written out of generosity rather than selfishness, sometimes for a specific person and sometimes just to leave on Google the information that we know someone out there will need one day.  Maybe not today or even tomorrow, but one day.  We leave a trail for other people to find what they need with no thought of reward.

Now we come to care about our blog in a new way.  We want to write more accessibly. We want to use formatting to help people scan quickly and take up complicated information with ease.  We want Google Analytics so we are clearer about who comes knocking. We want to know what our readers are looking at and finding useful. We want to know where they go next.

We won't mind an increase in traffic; we are still proud.  But like all experts, it's no longer about us.  It is about the place between us. 

It's a strangely comforting place to be.

Do have a look at my blog and tell me what you think!