Coffee Shop Talk is a semi-regular column where I talk about personal stuff, that will usually be related to the blog, but more about me and my life in general. I’ve designed it to be something of a conversation I would have with a friend at a coffee shop. Today I’m talking about becoming self-hosted.

I took a big step in the last week when it comes to this blog – I moved over to a self-hosted platform after using WordPress.com for many, many years. I started my first WordPress blog in early high school, which never went anywhere, and I eventually deleted it, but this blog has stuck, in its many variations.

I spend a lot of time on this blog – I’m basically always on twitter talking about book stuff, I’ve added a facebook page to my social media, and I probably spend at least an hour a day working on posts here, not to mention all of the time I spend actually reading books to blog about.

Realistically, this blog is at least a part-time job on top of an actual full-time job at a great local newspaper. I’ve been wanting to do more with the blog for almost a year, wanting to futz with the theme, or add some awesome plugins, and that’s just not possible for a WordPress.com blog. It’s also not possible to actually make any money off of it.

The process has been a little strange, and a little more confusing than I expected it to be. I’ve worked with a server before, but never set up my own, so I needed a little bit of help from Siteground, my host of choice.

For a while once it was set up, the site was down, but only if I used Chrome to look at it. It kept giving a privacy error, which I still haven’t figured out, but it seems to be working now? I won’t fight it, but I’d like to know what I did to make that happen. Other than that, it’s been a pretty painless process!

Anyway, you’ll be seeing some new changes here and there on the blog over the next few weeks – I’m working on the ability to do affiliate links with Indiebound and Barnes and Noble. I’m debating Amazon as well, because I know a lot of you shop there and I use their Audible service, but I have issues with how they pay authors, so I haven’t decided yet.Let me know if that’s something you’d like to see here. If I do decide to do all of this, it’ll be disclosed in each post as well as in the footer. I may also attempt to run some ads, because a little extra money certainly wouldn’t hurt my budget at the end of the month, if I’m eligible.

Would you guys be mortally offended by affiliate links or some ads on the page? Let me know, and if you guys use specific services, talk to me about it! I’ll be doing research on everything I can find, and make a decision whenever I make one.