A blog about location aware services, cloud architecture, mobile applications development on the iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, whatever, plus traveling, microblogging, and other random musings from developers building some secretly cool stuff

I’ve got to admit, wordpress is pretty epic as blog systems go.  They have a hosted service which is free, or you can pay for an upgrade to get premium features.  While I’ve always admired the wordpress guys from a far, I’ve always used blogger.  The reason has been pretty simple: I’ve always wanted/needed to use my own custom blog domain.  To have a hosted blog as blog.company.com or whatever.com (instead of with the wordpress domain) required the premium upgrade.  Now not that the insanely trivial 10 dollars a year or whatever it is for the wordpress upgrade isnt worth it, but just the fact that blogger offers that feature for free always just made me use blogger.

But this go around we are trying to be SEO focused from the get go.  And on that point blog.company.com doesnt hold as much juice for the overall domain strategy as company.com/blog does. To avoid mickey mousing stuff (like using a silly masking type strategy - which BTW losing some of the SEO advantage you were going for in the first place) the best thing is just to start hosting the blog on your own webserver.  I’ve usually avoided that for various reasons (such as why waist your own webservers resources when you don’t have to), but it was starting to look like time to break down and install the opensource version of wordpress.

As code goes, wordpress base is actually quite nice, and since we are (among other things) a LAMP house, integration is a snap. What’s particularly nice about the integration with your own system is that you can start utilizing blog feeds on other parts of your site with much less overhead.  For example, a good SEO strategy would be to put some of the most recent blog posts on the footer or sidebar of your “nonblog” pages, as it adds a we-bit of dynamic content (useful for both the nartural user flow of your site as well as SEO gains).

Now one way to do this if your site was hosted directly with wordpress or blogger would be to just get something like a feedburner widget which can be a plug in play type solution for your main site with minimal effort.  Of course you don’t want to do that because feed widgets like that bring in the posts via javascript and thus dont get seen at all to our google crawler friends.  So no SEO value there.  This leaves us with the sort of “standard” route that a lot of folks like myself have used (if they are LAMP based that is), is to rely on the MagpieRSS library.  Now the Magpie solution is cool in that you dont have to write your own xml parser but it tends to lack some flexibilty.  Even more importantly is that to use it effectively so you dont crush your server (by having every user request to your servers also have to fetch data from another server ) you need to implement a caching algorithm.  Now of course, writing code to cache in PHP is pretty simple but then you lose some of that dynamic SEO loven that we are looking for.

So that leaves us with a local wordpress install.  Integration becomes a snap, since they are just local lookups there is the lowest performance overhead and maximum SEO value.  Now already brought up the downside, which is that I dont get the offload advantage of “freely” using someone else hosting.  But heh, no matter, noone reads this blog anyways…