This will be the last AZIndex-related post on my personal blog at englishmike.net.  Since Christmas, AZIndex has all but taken over this blog, which is fine, but a bit of a bore for those who are not interested in the plugin, or WordPress even.  I was also having problems figuring out how to carve out a section of my site so that I could expand the documentation and examples for the plugin, which would involve creating all sorts of dummy posts, cluttering up the place.

I thought about setting up another WordPress blog dedicated to AZIndex, but I already had four other WordPress installations and it’s a pain having to keep them all up-to-date, and I was reluctant to add another to the list.  But then I came across the wonderful WP-Hive which allows multiple WordPress blogs to share the same codebase (sort of like WordPress-MU, but much easier to set up).

And so, after a bit of effort writing the content, the AZIndex for WordPress blog was born, on the azindex.englishmike.net subdomain.  Everything is now up and running on the new site, so if your only interest is AZIndex (and the technical WordPress stuff), then that is where you will find it from now on.  (You are, of course, welcome to continue dropping in on my personal site too, whenever the mood takes you.)

With WP-Hive, I now have three blogs sharing the same installation of WordPress, which means that I only have to upgrade once for all three when a new version of WordPress comes out, or whenever a new version of a theme or plugin comes out, which is a great time saver.  In addition, a single install of a new theme or plugin makes it immediately available to all the blogs (and they can be individually activated and configured, so they don’t have to be running on all of them), and any code tweaks I make to a theme are also shared by all the blogs.

There are one or two complications, such as having to relocate your favicon and sitemap files, and I seem to be having a little trouble with getting WP Super Cache to work correctly with multipage indexes, but otherwise it’s all running very smooth indeed.  The only other thing to be aware of is that all the blogs you set up to use WP-Hive share the same database.  That’s fine for lil’ old sites like mine, but if you combine a couple of heavily trafficked blogs together on a shared server account, then you could start hitting the number of concurrent transactions limit, which tends to be quite low on shared server accounts.  Still, if you’re only paying $5/month, it’s hard to grumble to much!