Blogging: Getting Started

Posted under General by The Blonde Diaries on July 3rd, 2008 12:09 am

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series blogging

One thing I try really hard at doing is keeping my online life separate from my personal life. I’m not sure to complete reason that I try to do this but I think it could be so that I can feel free to express myself online under an alias and not worry about someone finding my writing and questioning me about it. But as I continue to work on this blog I find myself posting the link in more places like my facebook and myspace accounts. As a result, I’ve had a few people ask me about starting a blog.

One of the first things I suggest is hosting your own blog/website over using a free site like blogger or blogspot. My main reason is that I am a former techie geek who likes coding and prefers to have free rein over my creations online. With a free site you can’t really change it up too much like you can with a self-hosted site.

Another reason I prefer this method is that I can use Word Press as my blogging software so to speak. Word Press is completely free and there are so many different page themes and plugins that you can install to really make your blog your own and customize it to do exactly what you want.

The good thing is that self-hosting really will not break the bank. Many sites are less than $100 a year for your own personal domain as well as storage space to hold the files that make up your blog. If you aren’t quite sure who to go with for a host the geeks at WebHostingGeeks.com have set up a site to rank the top hosts in various categories such as: best budget hosts, best blog hosts, and best forum hosts to name a few. You can easily compare ratings between hosts as well as features and prices before you decide who to go with to get your site going strong. I would definitely use this as a good starting point. Happy Blogging!