Get A Life (ONLINE) Part 4: Starting A Blog
If you have been following this series, by now you should have a pretty good grip on social life on the web. But maybe you want to step it up a notch and go for the Grand Daddy of life online and get a blog of your own. That’s great, but where do you start? There are so many options out there and so much to learn about the blogging world. Well, don’t get discouraged. Starting and maintaining a blog is not as hard as it may look. You don’t need to be a programming genius to get started. In fact, with the tools available today, starting a blog can be as easy as writing an email. In this post I will give you a few great options for starting a blog.
My first blog started almost 10 years ago using a tool called Blogger (before they were owned by Google). In those first days I used my blog mainly as an online journal to vent my thoughts. Back then there were very few good tools to use to blog with. But today there are literally hundreds of blogging platforms, and many of them are great options. For the purpose of this blog I will cover a couple of the best services: one will be for those who are less technically minded, and the other will be for those who want access to the most advanced features.
Easiest Blogging Tool
This category was a toss up for me between Posterous and Tumblr. They are both similar, and are great services that can help you get started with blogging in literally minutes. Since I have more experience with Tumblr, I’ll use that as my example today. The real shining point for Tumblr is the ease of use. You can post using your blog’s dashboard, you can email posts in, you can use the Tumblr bookmarklet to post from any site, or you can even tie your Tumblr blog into any other RSS feed to auto-post to your blog. It is an amazingly simple, yet powerful application.
Although Tumblr is a very powerful and elegant tool, it does have limitations since it is hosted on the Tumblr servers and doesn’t give you direct access to the source code. That’s just fine for most folks, but might leave some more experienced bloggers left wanting.
Most Advanced Blogging Tool
For those of you who don’t mind a little bit steeper of a learning curve, I would recommend WordPress. The best thing about WordPress is that it is open source software and backed by an enormous community.
With WordPress you’ll need to have your own hosting, but the upside is that you have access to the source code. You can do almost anything you want with WordPress. There are many big name companies that have chosen WordPress as their platform, and they use it for much more than just a blogging tool.
WordPress is almost infinitely extensible and is an impressive solution for those who are willing to get their hands dirty with the code.
Final Thoughts
Blogging is fun and can be a great tool to help build your online presence. You don’t need to be an expert to start blogging. You can start easily and you will learn a lot along the way. There are a few great websites to help you as you begin your blogging experience. Some of my favorites are:
This brings our four part series to a close. I hope you’ve learned something!
2 Responses to “Get A Life (ONLINE) Part 4: Starting A Blog”
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Blogging has been such a great tool for me. I have used it for my personal life and also to help grow my business. I hope to see more people utilize blogs and all their potential!