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Blogs...yep
MeepZero
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I'm thinking about creating one of these newfangled "web logs" that I keep hearing about. While spending a bit of time today researching the most popular blog systems (basically Blogger or Wordpress) I think I'm ready to settle into some sexy Wordpress action. However I've hit a minor snag.
It needs a snazzy name!
What the hell am I writing about anyway?
What the hell do people want to read in a silly blog?
These are my questions. I was considering a tech blog of some kind, or maybe a game blog, probably both. At the moment I'm not interested in making money, really just something to have fun with.
Any recommendation? Questions? Ideas? Perhaps a haiku or something?
It needs a snazzy name!
What the hell am I writing about anyway?
What the hell do people want to read in a silly blog?
These are my questions. I was considering a tech blog of some kind, or maybe a game blog, probably both. At the moment I'm not interested in making money, really just something to have fun with.
Any recommendation? Questions? Ideas? Perhaps a haiku or something?
MeepZero on
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Write what you enjoy?
The filename gives away what I was getting at anyhow.
So the other two items there. Need a name and opinions on blogger / wordpress if any.
I've used blogger and still have the address, although I don't write to it anymore. It works well enough, but I decided to focus on developing my own site, which I'm still working on and is the reason I've abandoned it at this point.
Blogger will let you publish to an external domain and Wordpress will import content from Blogger if you decided to switch, but yeah, Wordpress is more awesome than Blogger so why not just start with it in the first place? You can get a free hosted account with Wordpress and then export the database to move it to a self-hosted blog if you want to in the future.
(This only applies to Wordpress-hosted sites. If you use Wordpress on your own hosted domain, it's free.)
Also, I use Wordpress for my website/novel, and while I generally like it and it's a very powerful tool, the high frequency of updates is somewhat annoying.
In terms of content, write about whatever interests you and keep to a schedule. Most people's blogs consist of every six months, they remember they have one, write a post about remembering to post more and then disappear for six more months. I've posted in mine nearly every day since February, even though I don't have a 'theme' or really even any purpose to write. If you write weekly, that's great. Always write weekly so people know to expect it. It'll help you keep readers.
You might want to try out both and then just stick with whatever one you like better. But keep in mind, if you do ever have a hankering for learning how to do CSS, you'll have to pay $10 or $20 or something to do it for Wordpress (or buy and host your own domain).
Blogger is cool, Wordpress is better, except you have to pay to edit the css in the page. Wordpress has more to offer as far as themes and stuff. You can import Blogger into Wordpress.
Names are difficult to think up...mostly because you don't want to sound like an idiot on the internet.
If you get your hosting at Dreamhost, they have a very straightforward assistant for installing Wordpress (amongst other things). I got their New Year's sale deally with two years of hosting for about $20 and they occasionally have other sales as well.
(Of course, I've never tried it on other web hosting companies, so I don't know.)
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
Perhaps what I would recommend doing is just going to wordpress.com right now and creating a free hosted blog, choose any old name, make it private and start writing content and playing around with themes and widgets etc. This will let you get to know wordpress and create a big lump of content.
Once your comfortable with it, have settled on what you like to write about and decide this blogging thing is for you, you can either export the database to transfer your content over to a self hosted blog or if you like the theme and name you've alredy chosen for your wordpress hosted blog, just stay where you are and switch it to public.
Creating a trafficked blog requires some amount of work and consistent updates.
Anyway, Wordpress is king and nothing is even remotely close to competing with it. Wordpress.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
If you want to be Serious Buisiness about blogging you should check out problogger.com
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
My blog is rooted in a business concept and will (hopefully) make money. I assume advertising is the best way, but selling merchandise is also part of my plan. I started a blog on Wordpress kind of as a throw away just to get familiar with the process.
Problogger is a blog about blogging, not a software solution. As far as I'm aware, he uses wordpress. Unless I got the URL wrong in which case oops.
I did get the URL wrong. Sorta. http://www.problogger.net/ is where the blog is, .com seems to be a forum he is starting. So yeah, check out problogger.net . Amongst other things, I'm sure he discusses revenue streams.
As much as people enjoy writing personal blogs, people don't really enjoy reading them. Something like 70% of all of the blogs in existence are diary-type blogs that really only interest the person writing them. So, you should most likely have a topic. It can be general. Dogs. Food. Games. Movies. You can (and should) put a personal spin on the topics you choose to write about under that blanket term. You should update often, but no more than once a day--if you happen to write more than one post in a day, set it to run the next morning. A lot of people utilize feed readers, and if you have too many updates a day it gets annoying and, also, your blog ultimately ends up coming up less on their reader, so if you want to get more hits, you spread out posts.
The name of your blog should be short and memorable, and to be such it has to have something to do with the topic but also be kind of witty. This usually involves a bit of experimentation because of the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, one of them probably has the name you think is unique and perfect.
If you want to talk about becoming popular, you need to visit other blogs and comment on them (with your profile, leaving a link to your blog). Something meaningful, not just a "Hey, this was cool. Check out my blog!"
It also helps to get your blog listed on others' blogrolls, which is something you can offer to trade. That is, you can have a link to someone's blog on your site in exchange for them linking to yours. The more links to your blog that exist on the internet, the more credence search engines will give to it, so if someone searches for food, movies, or dogs, your blog will be higher up in the results.
This is kind of getting off on a tangent. But, lastly: Twitter. Use twellowhood, find people who are tweeting about things you are blogging about, and follow them. Advertise every new blog post on your twitter. This helps a lot, and is really where the sometimes useless Twitter shines.
I have more to say, but that's it for now. Hope that helps a little.