In a comment to yesterday's post, someone asked how to get started with blogging. First, you should know that some people are really irritated by the term blog, and prefer weblog. Having got that piece of trivia out of the way, here are my suggestions.
First, here's a good, concise overview of the whole phenomenon called Blogging 101. If you're sure you want to go ahead and start a weblog, you need to decide what software you'll use, which means in the first line deciding if you want to have the blog hosted in your own server space, or someplace else. If you don't know what that means, you probably don't have your own server space. Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog is very informative and will clear up some of the basic technical issues.
There are maybe a dozen different kinds of blogging software out there. I tried out three or four of them, and ended up with Movable Type. The thing to remember is, once you get setup and start posting, it's not easy to move across to a different software package; so do some research before you jump in. I did do some research, but I'm still not sure I made the best decision by going with MT, especially given the newly released version 3.0, the change in policy on cost, and the blog-wide outrage following therefrom (see Sillybean's summary of the unhappiness -- to which I subscribe, for the reasons she outlines -- and while you're at it, have a look at her well designed MT blog). Here are the highlights and lowlights of my experience with MT 2.6:
| Good |
Bad |
| MT is fully configurable, so that with enough time and energy you can get it to look exactly like you want it to look. There are some beautifully done MT blogs out there (but also a lot of people jumping ship, given the new controversy); there are many people developing additional features for MT, some of which do very interesting and useful things; once MT is installed and configured, it is easy to add daily posts, especially if you use a third party client to do this (I use ecto) challenge is a good thing |
MT is not easy to install unless you are very comfortable with php and mysql. Don't know what those terms mean? You'll learn, if you want to install MT; if you want anything beyond the basic templates (which most people do), you'll find MT is not easy to configure. the support forum at MT, while large and all encompassing, is firmly based in the premise that you will have to learn the guts of the program yourself, and woe to you if you dare to suggest that this approach won't work for everybody; MT people are very, very loyal and just a tad defensive. if you don't have time to learn the fine points of the inner workings, you'll be stuck, because MT's license is pretty restrictive.
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There's an easier, less flexible, hosted version of MT called
TypePad, and there's also
LiveJournal, which is actually very flexible, quite inexpensive, and has a huge community in place.
That's about all the wisdom I have to offer as far as setting up a blog is concerned. I started this one primarily as a way to provide information for the people who read my novels, and it's evolved into something more than that. I'll probably keep up with it for as long as there seems to be a real interest, or I run out of things to say.