Blog your life away - Digital Life

Blog your life away

4 December 2008 - Written by Gregor MacDonald - Useful tips

So you want to write about your life, someone else's life, or just life in general? You'll be wanting to write a Blog, then! One sticking point - you don't know how to build a blogging website from scratch. There's an easy solution that requires almost no technical web-building expertise whatsoever.

Blogging lets you get on your soap box There are many free blogging services out there that not only allow you to create the vehicle through which you can air your views of the world to the world, but also let you make your blog look and feel however you want it to.

Arguably the most common and easy-to-use blogging services are Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com/) and Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/). Both options are free to use, although you may want to consider which one best suits your needs. Wordpress.com has a huge amount of space available to you. But while you can choose a theme for your blog, you'll need to fork out some coins if you want to make any personalised changes to the themes of Wordpress. Blogger, on the other hand, has quite a bit less storage space but allows your own creative mind to set the style, look and feel of your site to suit your desires.

Go on, try creating a blog. It's fun! If you want fellow Orconites to grab a look and start spreading the word, why not tell us about your creation in the comments below.

Comments

Nyssa Sutherland (aka Carmine)

4 December 2008 - 9:21 pm

I actually just started a blog a couple of weeks ago using Wordpress. Surprised how easy it was to use and there are loads of great free themes out there! So no need to pay out money if you want to blog on WordPress with style. And here’s a link to a page listing 100 great Word Press theme from online Smashing Magazine::

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/

And my own blog offering:

http://dark-isles.net/carmine/

Al Ronberg

4 December 2008 - 10:59 pm

I just started a photoblog - posting a photo every day! It is a real challenge and I try and keep it interesting!

Gregor MacDonald - Orcon

5 December 2008 - 9:44 am

Carmine - I’ve watched the development of Wordpress with interest over the years. Previously you could only go with Wordpress’ default theme. They changed this about two years ago and now you can select your own theme and, for a small fee, you can even edit the theme to how you prefer. There’s a number of install-to-server blogs that you can get too (I’ll cover this at a later date), but of the completely free ones Blogger and Wordpress are probably the best from an ease-of-use point of view

Al Ronberg - feel free to post a link to your Photoblog here. I’ve been blogging and running forums for about ten years now. The hardest thing is getting the motivation to do an article on a regular basis. My advice would be, if you think of multiple things at a time, write them all but only publish one per day. Keep the other ones “for a rainy day”. That way your readers get the impression that you have a regular post on your blog and will, in turn, keep coming back to read