What Randy said!
So this is probably way more of a response than you want, but it seems applicable, so here goes... Backcountrypost used to be my personal blog/website. I built it back in 2007 from scratch, no wordpress or anything. It was a total pain! So I posted up all my TR's and then let it rot for several years, never updating it. Then a few years back I discovered the whole forum concept and really got into posting trip reports again because people actually would see them and appreciate them and interact with me. Totally different than what I had experienced on my personal site and it motivated me to get out a lot more. I still didn't do anything with backcountrypost at that time, just kept posting them to the forum I was using.
As time went on, I became pretty disenchanted with how that particular site was operated so I decided I'd go back to the blog and just cross-post. So I redesigned my site from wordpress to make it easier to keep updated. Did that for a while before getting really unhappy with that other place and then decided to start the forum here on backcountrypost because I knew a handful of other people who were in the same boat.
Before the BCP community, I was religious about posting my trip reports on the blog. But since, I totally suck at it because I only really want to post them here where the interaction happens. Am I biased because I started this site? Absolutely. But I think it's still a pretty valid opinion considering my history. The BCP blog still gets a fair amount of traffic, part of why I still try and keep it up, but if you look at it right now, I'm only caught up on trip reports to April 2012 and I did that in July!
http://backcountrypost.com/blog/
Ultimately, I think doing the personal site is awesome and well worth spending the $6 per month for hosting. But at the same time, I'm a bigger fan of the community aspect on sites like this and if I weren't running a site, I would probably just post on the forum, if I believed in what the forum was about. Cross-posting your posts like
IntrepidXJ,
Udink,
Bill,
lostlandscapes and others do is a good way to have the best of both worlds, assuming you have the time, energy and money to keep it up. It's also pretty much
copy and paste to cross-post depending on how your personal site is built.
And last... We'll be launching a new feature of BCP soon called the Backcountrypost Member Network that may be of interest to you. Short explanation; we'll have a section here at BCP with a listing of member-run outdoors sites/blogs for people to go check out and those sites will display a little mini-banner on their site linking back to BCP. The interlinking is great for everyone's SEO and I'm pretty sure people perusing backcountrypost would benefit from a 'directory' of similar outdoors sites to check out.
lostlandscapes was our test site for the new system, check it out at
www.timothypluta.com. Notice the tiny BCP Member Network logo in the bottom right hand corner of his site.