Blogging basics
Forget your stereotypes about blogs—they’re not just for people who want to post pictures of their cat and what they had for breakfast. Blog software is now the simplest way to create and maintain a website, which could be anything: a research portfolio, a conference news page, a writing forum, a lab report. Blogs let you create date-stamped postings, like an online diary, but they also can be used to manage calendars, lists of links, or ordinary static web pages.
Free
Blogger (now owned by Google), Tumblr, and WordPress.com are the three main solutions, and most people seem to agree that WordPress is the best choice. One big issue is that your blog will be a subdomain of someone else—it’ll look like getnetsavvy.blogger.com or getnetsavvy.wordpress.com, which is a bit naff. If you want to use your own domain name, you’ll have to pay. Free blogs may also post the occasional ad, and they don’t have all the features and modifiability of a more sophisticated blog. Nevertheless, they can be a good testing ground for you to try out blogging (you can export your postings and move them to a better blog later on), or to create a small, temporary site for a specific purpose. And you can’t beat the price.
Through a blog-hosting service
Typepad is a service which will host your blog for a monthly fee. It has several advantages of this over a free blog: you can use your own domain name, you have more flexibility to modify the appearance and functions, and you can host ads or run a business (if that matters). There are other similar hosting services for websites—SquareSpace gets good press. The monthly fees for these are not high—less than USD $10 a month. But to me, if you’re happy with paying a monthly fee, you might as well sign up with a commercial web hosting package that offers blogging. These have some side benefits, like managing multiple email addresses and subdomains.
On your own web host
Most monthly web-hosting packages include the ability to have a Movable Type or WordPress blog. I’ve tried both, and think WordPress is the way things are going: unlike Movable Type, it’s open-source, and there’s a strong development community with lots of themes and plugins. I also find it a little easier to edit the source code and tweak the appearance of pages. Yes, if you go this road it’s well worth learning a little bit of HTML and CSS, so you can edit content and appearance more effectively, and you’ll need to keep your installation up-to-date and virus-free, but these are all useful transferable skills.
Thanks for the inspiration in last night’s class Mike. I’ve now set up my first blog. At the moment it’s only between a friend and myself to discuss tech news. I’m not sure a blog is the best method of doing this, but emailing back and forth was much more clunky. It was incredibly easy to set up the blog and go through the settings – I used Blogger.com as I already have a Gmail account. Have also set up Delicious account after you mentioned this last week and already find that invaluable.
Good stuff. One advantage of a blog is that you can both go back and amend or correct postings as new information comes to light, either in the body of the blog or in comments. And bear in mind that it’s public, so you may get helpful comments from passers-by as well. It’s more like a conversation than a wiki would be. It can be good to frame the blog with a little semi-public text and clear stranger-friendly postings to take advantage of that. Have a play with the themes as well, and try embedding screenshots.