It really works to make your empire by the likes of British Empire - have a lot of small colonies everywhere. Strip-mine systems and keep your colonies poor and small. Move all extra population back to the homeworld. Put the best administrator on Earth...Once pretty large area around your capital is explored, exploited and terraformed/colonized - move your capital to the rim, rinse and repeat.
I read that and all that runs through my mind is an image of everybody on the coast of england grabbing a paddle and paddling away trying to move GB...
And yes, I usually do that too Havear, or close to it. I expand rather slowly myself, and try to plop down a colony a system or two away early on in whatever the richest system mineral wise I have come across so as to act like a hub for mineral collection, plus it gets the civilian shipping going quicker so I can be a lazy slacker. Later on I do end up dropping a 0 pop colony in each system, just for mineral collection and usually save the real colonies for systems a couple jumps away so that way again, I get more shipping and I also have bases to stage military fleets through.