Bill, On the face of your ascertion, I agree that for the majority of professionals, this should be something they can outsource. Unfortunately for me, prior to my real estate career I was a software developer, so poking my nose into this type of thing is a common pitfall. I'm likely to think that I can do it better/faster/cheaper...whether that's indeed true or not.

As you can see from the comments at the Lab, I'm not the only one. If someone has a self-hosted Wordpress blog, running on their own Linux server, regardless of industry, then whether they should be outsourcing it or not, they have too much geek in them to do otherwise.

However, as it relates to blogging and social networking, I disagree that your company can do everything I did, and more importantly everything that needs to be done. To be fair, a partnership could certainly have been employed. I've provided one extreme (do everything yourself). You've provided another extreme (you do everything). I'm somewhat in disbelief you would have done everything I did.

I believe you could definitely do the easy part. Change the DNS registration, setting up the apache config, and performing the admin function in Wordpress to change the URL could easily be outsourced, though the time spent on that activity was minimal.

Is/was your company aware that the Wordpress admin function doesn't rewrite old URLs within the blog? Hopefully you do now, and adding that to your scripts and making sure that gets done would definitely be value-added. For someone not familiar with MySQL, that task alone justifies the outsourcing of this effort.

But what I don't see your company doing, is going to all of the various social networking sites (and quite probably google & yahoo) to re-register the blog. That component of the task is at least as important as the other items, and having this list of stops to make, along with which social networking players play nicer than others is quite valuable.

Steve:

Excellent comment, and I loved this line -

"...whether they should be outsourcing it or not, they have too much geek in them to do otherwise."

I'm familiar with this issue because I'm a geek and I think you know that I'm totally comfortable with geeks doing geeky things because they're not in our taget audience. But on to your more serious comments...

"As you can see from the comments at the Lab, I'm not the only one."

Yes, and it is the widespread interest in doing it themselves that was what I found so unexpected. I can totally relate to someone of your background doing this.

"Is/was your company aware that the Wordpress admin function doesn't rewrite old URLs within the blog?"

Yes.

"Hopefully you do now, and adding that to your scripts and making sure that gets done would definitely be value-added."

Yes, we do, and we go even further. When a company converts from say a Wordpress blog to Blogsite we also transform all historical content to the new domain (if indeed that's the case), and/or to the new URI's. Most blog tools (as you know) do not truly embrace the idea of unique URI's; MyST Blogsite does, and in the process of integrating legacy posts, we provide each with a bona-fide GUID and corresponding URI that becomes the authoritative home for the object. We also handle the creation of permanent redirects from the legacy URL's for all posts to the new home for each object.

"I don't see your company doing, is going to all of the various social networking sites (and quite probably google & yahoo) to re-register the blog."

Correct, we don't manage all the social site changes because it's generally impractical to do so (security and credentials being the biggest show stopper). However, some business people do want this task outsourced. With regard to search engines - yes, we manage all of that for new and existing clients that are changing domains, brands, names, etc. We even re-register all feeds across 80 RSS search engines, and of course, the new feeds contain all the new URL's.