Separate Your Blogs, Yet Keep Them Together

If you're like me, and have a blog, maybe what you write about in your blog isn't all of what you are. Most of us are more than one person. I'm a blogger, I work with Windows Networking, plus I have a private life. Really. I enjoy cooking, some miscellaneous humour and philosophy, and various other pursuits too.

So, if you're going to blog about your non-technical abilities too, would you put the non-technical stuff in the same blog as your technical stuff? Do you park your car in your kitchen, or sleep in your garage? Hopefully not - you have separate areas of your house, each one for a different purpose. Maybe you should with your blog, too.

If you have one blog, with multiple topics, you can separate and index the various posts by using labels. But maybe you would like something different for each topic - maybe a topic relevant blogroll for each.

I have many friends with their own web sites. Some, I met through blogging. Others are experts in Windows Networking. And I know some folks with cooking blogs. It would be stupid to put a cooking blogroll on a web site about Windows Networking, though.

Some folks can show how to have conditionally displayed widgets, so you can display one blogroll when a certain label search is active. If you want to hack the HTML Template code, you can learn how to do this. But, there's an easier solution.

Blogs are free - you can have as many as you can setup. The only cost here is 10 USD / year, for domain registration / DNS hosting, for the domain. You can host as many blogs as you wish in the domain, for that single 10 USD. If you already have a (non Blogger) web site, you don't even pay that - there's your domain, already setup.

Once you have a domain, just add one or more virtual hosts to your domain. Publish your blogs to the virtual hosts in your domain, one blog / virtual host pair.

If you already have a domain, with a web site, there's the start of your blog cluster. If you just setup your domain, you may wish to setup a home blog, similar to my Nitecruzr Dot Net. A home blog is an option, not a necessity.

And, what you setup will be yours forever (at least, as long as you pay the yearly fee).

So, I setup Nitecruzr Dot Net, my collection of Blogger blogs all in one domain - my own domain - not a part of "BlogSpot.Com". Each blog will be part of the whole, yet as unique as I like to make it. Setting the domain up took 30 minutes, and writing about doing it, another hour or so (not that I'm done writing).

Once you've setup a collection of blogs, there are a variety of possible ways to dynamically merge them, in relevant ways that your readers should appreciate. And there are variations of this setup - some righteous, others spurious - that you need to consider, carefully.

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