free blog |
HOSTING BLOGS ISSUES |
None of these detriments matter to casual bloggers who are in it for the fun of self-expression in an online community. But they do matter to those who are more ambitious about presenting content in an organized and undistracted manner and who might eventually want access to sophisticated features.
It is usually impossible to transfer a blog from a social network to another platform. So if you start blogging in a social network and later move up to a full-featured blogging platform, you will most likely lose your old entries.
For the determined blogger, one step up from social networks leads to a blog service without the cozy community games such as friend lists and memberonly e-mails. In this book, I cover two such services: Blogger.com and TypePad.The fanciest of the blog hosts have evolved into fairly powerful and sophisticated vehicles for mounting and maintaining a determined blog. The free services tend to be a little stripped-down compared to those that charge a modest monthly fee. Both Blogger and TypePad have become rampantly popular. My observation is that Blogger.com has more personal-diary blogs.
Blog hosts provide the specialized blogging software and the server space that holds your blog entries. You don’t need to bring anything except a desire to blog and (in some cases) a little money. The Web address (URL) of your blog usually includes the name of the hosting company, like this: mylife. bloghost.com. Blogger and TypePad also both offer an option for owners of their own domains, such as www.my-blog.com.
Installing sophisticated blog software in your own server space (leased from a Web hosting company) is the most cost-effective way to get full-throated blogging power over a long period. This method is also the most challenging
way to start blogging. I don’t mean scratch-your-head challenging, tear-your-hair-out challenging. Grown-men-weeping sort of challenge. Self- installation of a blog is like building an SUV.
Technical sorts who are accustomed to installing programs across computers think nothing of setting up blog software. And there is definitely satisfaction in mastering the hardships and driving that SUV down the blogging highway.
I created my first blog in Greymatter, which presented a thorny installation and setup challenge to my feebly technical brain. (Greymatter isn’t used much anymore.) I poured hours into mastering a basic understand of server databases and hand-coding design templates. If you do it once, it will never be so difficult again, even if you switch from one blogging program to another.
It doesn’t make sense to document the exact installation process of the programs covered in this book, because each is similar to the others but different in the details.