WARNING: Boring computer talk ahead…
Ok, this is mainly for Scott, but others may be interested in this too. Paul Stamatiou has a fantastic article about getting started with blogging. I’ll try to paraphrase it below for you.
There are basically two different types of blogs out there in cyberspace: hosted or installed.
Hosted blogging solutions are services supplied by companies such as blogger, livejournal, typepad, blog, etc. I started out using Blogger.com, now owned by Google, because the set-up was simple, it was very user friendly to post, it offered mobile post-by-email, post-by-phone, image hosting, and best of all…it is completely free (many of the other services have monthly charges to get this much functionality). In my mind, Blogger is the best hosted blogging service out there for the price. With zero technical skills, you can have a blog up and running in under 10 minutes.
Nearly a year later (and over 230 posts) I decided to switch to an installed version. There are several companies who offer software for blog installation: wordpress and movable type are two of the largest. Since Movable Type is several hundred dollars to purchase and WordPress is free, that made my decision much easier.
WordPress is also open source software, which means the source code that makes up the software is freely available to the public to improve, develop and support. The philosophy behind open source software is this: if one lone software developer is smart then thousands working together will be brilliant.
For the most part, this has proved to be true.
Because of the cooperation between programmers working together across the world, I now have many more interesting tools and resources on my blog (ie. weather, feeds, commenting system, etc). This is a very neat idea…and also a practical way to make something much better than it started out.
The down side of using an installed system is that you need to know a little bit about how websites work and how to manipulate code to make them work. WordPress is about as simple an installed system as you could ask for (only requiring you to set up a few database connections, directory permissions, and a few minor configuration files).
It took me about 20-30 minutes to get the site up and running on WordPress from the time I downloaded the software to the time I posted my first story. WordPress even had an automated tool that extracted all my old Blogger posts and put them into the WordPress database (saving me weeks of work transferring them all by hand).
I purchased the domain through godaddy.com and am using them for hosting as well. They have great 24/7 customer service (I got a call after I made my purchase from someone asking me how my experience with them went. I thought it was a joke at first, but they seriously wanted to know if I was completely satisfied with the experience). So on customer service alone, I’d recommend them.
So the bottom line: If you don’t know a thing about how websites work, then Blogger is probably your best and cheapest option. You can’t beat the price, and the functionality is quite good.
If you know what things like HTML, PHP, FTP and SQL mean, then I would say WordPress is your best (and cheapest) option.
Either way, you’ll be up and running in short order and showing the world dumb pictures of smoking monkeys just like everyone else.
