I put off starting a blog for a long time because I thought it would be hard. I thought it would be technical. I thought I’d have to install scripts and tear my hair out getting them to work. At that point, most of what I’d read about blogs and RSS was just so much geek-speak.
Was I ever wrong!
When I finally got the courage to give it a go, I went to blogger.com and signed up for an account. To my amazement, I had a blog set up in about 5 minutes. My first post was uploaded to my site about 10 minutes later.
Blogs are an easy way to get your voice out onto the Net. For the Web-It-Yourself, custom blogs are a great way to learn about web technologies and create something from the ground up.
With a little bit of tech savvy anyone can create their own custom blog. When choosing blog software or a blog service consider the following:
Support -
Implementing new software will create a lot of questions. Does the software have a support site/forum? How large is the user community? Is the user community helpful?
Blogging is an abbreviation of “web-logging”. The simplest definition of a blog is that it is an online log that is organized in reverse chronological order. It comprises of comments, declarations, links, or anything else of interest to the blog writer.
There are two basic requirements of starting your own blog. You need a software to run a blog and a place on the Internet to host your blog.
Taking into consideration the above mentioned two factors, there can be four categories of blogs:
1. Free Software + Free Webhosting
Of all people in the world I was easily one of the most pessimistic about computers, the Internet and now that I even know they exist-blogs. I think blogs are pretty cool but I never thought I could have one. I thought the processes of getting a site; domain name and the actual building of the blog would just be out of my league. I’m a complete novice when it comes to technology, but I do like writing a journal, and I thought having a journal on-line would be both fun and make life simpler for me. No more writing with pens, other people can read my stuff and comment on it, and I could add pictures to illustrate my points and make things look more interesting.
The more I use WordPress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn’t yet support.
Number 1, you can set up WordPress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you’ll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.
Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start getting traffic. A blog like WordPress can do all that “grunge” work for you automatically.
