Geoff Arnold

Let's go blogging now, everybody's learning how....

A friend on the ASML asked me about how to get into blogging. The obvious place for this information is in my blog, of course..... [Revised]

The simplest way to find out if blogging is for you is to use one of the free services such as Blogger. Sign up, generate your first few entries, share the URL with friends so that they'll link to your blog. Most important: Create a bookmarks ("Favorites") folder in your web browser to hold all the important URLs for your blog, including the page itself, the admin page, the new entry page, and so forth. Make it trivial for you to add content.

Then do it. Regularly. Get into the habit. I always do a last-minute email check before going to bed (which for me may be at 2am, but let's not go there), and when I do I always think, "Anything to blog tonight? News, experiences, thoughts...?"

I did that for about 3 months before I decided that this was really something that I wanted to do. At this point, I realized that I wanted more control over content, presentation, and management of my blog. I wanted space to store other web pages, pictures, audio, and so forth. And I wanted my own URL. Obviously we're moving from "free" to "paid", but the costs were quite reasonable.

On the recommendation of my son, Chris, I went to LogJamming to get some web space. LogJamming is interesting because it's a geeks' site: cheap, good tools, sensible policies, and no support whatsoever. Most bare-bones web hosting companies don't allow any server-side stuff on their cheap accounts: if you want mySQL, CGI and PHP you have to pay extra. LogJamming supports basic blog software on their cheapest accounts, though (of course) you're on your own when it comes to installation. Their FAQ file is OK, but a little behind the curve.

I signed up for an account ($5/month), and bought my domain name from domainmonger.com. Then I created a subdirectory on my home PC that mirrors the structure of the directory hierarchy on the server. I picked a blog package: I chose MovableType in part because that's what Chris uses. I downloaded it, unpacked it, pored over the documentation, uploaded it, configured it, and got it going. All of that took about a day.

Other stuff you'll need:
(1) A good FTP client to upload and download stuff. Mac users have many choices: I like CaptainFTP. If you run Windows, I suggest SmartFTP. In both cases you can simply drag and drop stuff between the local hierarchy and the remote, and it takes care of details like re-establishing FTP sessions, managing passwords, etc.
(2) Several browsers on your machine. If you plan to tweak the presentation style of your blog (and doesn't everyone), please, PLEASE check how it looks under several different browsers. I always verify under Mozilla (which is my main browser under Windows or Linux), Internet Explorer, Safari (my primary Mac browser), and Opera.

A final question: do you need to learn HTML in order to blog? The answer is, not really. When I'm blogging there's only one HTML construct that I use regularly, and that is for hypertext links. For example, to create the link earlier in this entry to LogJamming I had to type
<a href="http://logjamming.com">LogJamming</a>.
That isn't too hard, and by now it's pretty much a matter of muscle memory.

Looking back over this, I realize that for a non-technical person it's pretty daunting. So don't worry about all this stuff for now. Just head over to Blogger, sign up, and get blogging. If you enjoy it, there's plenty of time to think about if and how you want to go further.

Posted by geoff2 at April 4, 2004 10:18 AM