Heheh. I pay about $12 a month to host my blogs at Media Temple. Keeps Noah's servers clean until I can find a .Net solution that works for me. ;)

Nice blog, Jess!

Thanks Cliff, I'm working on my own wordpress distro currently, packaging together a series of SEO, Usability components and themes that all work together nicely. BTW, the best thing about keeping them separated like you guys are doing is that your links from your blog back to your site are from separate networks. Ofcourse the downside is that any links back to your blog will help the blog and not necessarily the store.

If you guys find a good .NET blogging engine let me know. I ran communityserver for a year and only recently turned away from it as the community involvement just didn't seem to be there and although it's a commercial product, it doesn't have strong support. dasBlog (http://www.dasblog.net/) looks really good though and I almost moved to it. But the plug-ins for wordpress, the themes, wow! Emily has 980 wordpress themes: http://www.emilyrobbins....ble-for-download-266.htm 980!?! It's incredible!

Jess

I vote with Tim, You can't beat blogger, and it's on a separate network that way. Log in, do your thing, log out...I like easy.

Unless you have people working for you, running and maintaining a store, coming up with meaningful content to actually post to your blog, and doing all the other things that you need to do seems like so much for a person, why add to that having to watch the backend of your blog too? Let them do it for you, and it's FREE...which is a good price.

Yeah, see, you don't have time to mess around with a stand-alone blog. Cliff uses his for so many things and it's so tricked out that he needs one he can modify and control. A guy like you Bryan just needs the marketing and SEO benefits from the blog, not the hassles and features. Blogger has been very successful for my one client that is big into blogging, it's free. If you want to you can put a custom skin on it but there are plenty of very nice templates. it's free. At least check it out, it may not be robust enough for you, I don't know...but even the guys out there hyping the marketing benefits will say use blogger...then you pop those little RSS chiclets in your site and watch the spiral start...And it's free

And lets not forget, it also eliminates all the above mentioned issues with multiple technologies on a server and security and performance, doesn't matter because it's nowhere near your site.