Why use Wordpress Blog if I have Discourse?

If the WordPress user account has the Discourse user specified then the post stub will be in their name, and show as one of their posts on the Discourse instance.

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Newbie as well here. We’re in the process of setting up Discourse but we also have a Wordpress.org blog. Do you know how we can set up the url so it reads "www.blog.(our discourse name).com?

What’s the goal for doing this?

Hi Stephen, our goal is to allow the articles on our blog to show up in other news feeds, as well as introduce others to our discourse forum.

Sure, I was more referring to the use of ‘www.blog’ - your blog or publishing front-end can sit at:

www.sitename.com

and your discourse instance at:

community.sitename.com

community is just a example, you obviously use pretty much anything to denote your Discourse install.

There’s no need to go two-levels deep with a DNS name using ‘www’ and ‘blog’ in one URL, it’s lengthy and only serves to confuse users.

Didn’t you guys engage someone to set this up a while ago?

Hi Stephen, thank you for your quick replies, I appreciate it. Yes, Jay set up Discourse for us. Our url is www.hsp.world. We’re thinking of setting our blog url to be www.blog.hsp.world, right now we have it sitting at http://hspblog.modelsmith.com/ (we’re just tweaking the site and it should be ready in a few days). Is this the best way to go about this do you think?

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Why not just blog.hsp.world?

Hi Hawk, thank you for suggesting, yes we thought that may be a good way to go, www.blog.hsp.world - we’re not sure how to go about creating or re-directing the url though…

I’m actually suggesting www.blog.hsp.world

What exactly are you getting stuck on?

Thank you @HAWK, well it sounds dumb (and I hope it isn’t too dumb), but how do we go about keeping the site hosted on the server it’s on, but changing the url to blog.hsp.world?

You need to repoint your domain – your DNS provider will be able to tell you how to do that.

I was just looking at my domain provider, I didn’t think it would be that simple. Thank you @HAWK, really appreciate you taking the time.

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If it’s WordPress then you need to update the site settings too. If you don’t do that bit your permalinks won’t work, although there is a fix by hard-coding the new URL in the wp-config.php if you do lock yourself out.

If you’re using SSL on the blog the certificate will also need to be replaced every time you alter the URL.

Either way though this isn’t really a discourse question or related to the subject of this topic. I would reach out to whoever hosts your WordPress.

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Absolutely thank you @Stephen I just wasn’t sure if anything would be different based on the main url being our discourse site. Thank you, I appreciate it.

If the Wordpress already uses wp-discourse and has posts or post stubs created for comments then those links will need to be changed, which includes manually updating database entries. Based on what you’ve said above though it’s hard to tell if this will be necessary.

Thank you @Stephen I think at this point it’ll just be on it’s own, we’ll have a link to Discourse on the blog. That may change in the future but we’ll start with this. Thank you again Stephen. :slight_smile:

It may be a bit late, but you might find blogging on Discourse and embedding on your website a useful alternative:

Actually even that is not mostly true. Nofollow is only a hint and googlebot obeys it or not, dependig of situation. If that target is valid by Google it will follow and counts it as backlink. And even there is no nofollow and Googlebot values the target as low quality, googlebot doesn’t follow it.

Bing is different story. It will follow almost everything and again and again, even when it is 404 and doesn’t update 301s.

Nofollow is almost as overrated as robots.txt — Google follows it sometimes, but if it finds even one link, like from gmail, it doesn’t just doesn’t care robots.txt anymore in that case.

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