Blogging for Beginners
What is a blog? I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked me this with a look of sheer confusion on their face. Maybe it is a strange word but it is actually a neat concept loved by many people out there today. Blogs are becoming increasingly popular.
A blog is actually a short term for the concept of a web log. An easy way to think of a blog is as an online journal. It is a place to share information with others, or to privately keep information online for your eyes only. Blogs can be shared with the public or password protected if one so chooses. There are blogs out there on millions of topics both personal, political, technical, and otherwise.
The information put into a blog is instantly published online to a web site. Most blogs are updated frequently either by one person or a group of people as group blogs are growing in popularity as well.
For someone to set up a blog there are a few steps that need to be taken and a few decisions that will need to be made. One of the first decisions is would you like to go with a free, less personalized service to host your blog or would you like to have something that is more personalized and that can be made your own, though you will have to pay a small fee to do so.
If you choose to go with the free service, you can choose from several free online services including wordpress.com, blogger.com or typepad.com. The disadvantage to using these services is that you cannot have a personal URL such as myblog.com but will rather have a URL that looks more like this myblog.wordpress.com . This is simply a matter of preference. However, there will be more options for personalizing and updating a blog that you yourself host on your own website. The advantage to the free services is one, it’s free, two, it is usually much easier and more step-by-step, where you just follow a few quick and easy steps and within minutes have a blog set up.
