Why blog?

When I started writing, I decided I wanted to do it to the best of my ability. I bought the books and scoured the Internet, and over time, in my opinion, my writing improved. Obviously that’s a personal point of view, but for the sake of the hours I put into it, my ego would prefer to believe that’s exactly what happened.

During this time, I concentrated on the creative process, the mechanics of the writing: how to write fluent pros or how to define the motivations for the protagonist, that sort of thing. I plotted and planned, wrote and edited, and produced a series of short stories that I was proud of. These stories were writing exercises and helped find my voice for the larger projects which were bouncing around my head, some of which I have since embarked upon.

Throughout this, I hadn’t even considered the commercial aspect to writing. So as I became more content with my writing, I started to research what I needed to do to get those stories read by as many people as possible. Obviously the financial side played a role, many people could equate to many pennies, but it’s also the pride of being enjoyed by a large readership. During that research, one of the pieces of advice that I came across time and time again, was to create a blog.

Blogs serve many purposes, they’re not just solely marketing and promotional tools. They can share links and other interesting tit-bits of knowledge, they can give your readers a window into your life or they can show how your writing is able to adapt to non-fiction. Personally, the thing I find most helpful about blogs, particularly blogs centered around writing, is to see what other people are doing, how they did it and what traps they either avoided or fell into. This is what I’ve personally tended to blog about so far though I do hope to include some fiction in the near future.

Hosting

So, having established that a blog was worthwhile, the next step was to turn that concept into a reality. The first stage was easy: registering the domain name. I used 123-reg, found the domain name I wanted, set up a direct debit and pressed “go”. That was all done in less than five minutes. There are heaps of registration companies offering these services, both registration and hosting, and these are easy to find and are very affordable.

Luckily a friend of mine offered to host the site so that saved a bit of money. Speaking of which, if you ever need anything web related, speak to him, Allan Jardine; he’s a smart cookie and has just started consulting.

My site is managed by cPanel, a hosting management platform that enables non-technical users to setup and maintain their servers. In just a few clicks I had a basic web page and an email forwarder. So far so good, everything progressing very nicely.

It was then time to think about how I would create and maintain a web site and blog. Fifteen years ago I created my old employer’s web site by using Notepad to hand craft HTML. It was laborious, but it worked. I wasn’t expecting it to be that cumbersome these days, fifteen years is a long time in the computer industry, but then again, I wasn’t expecting it to be as easy as it was either. I knew Word could export web pages, but I suspected I could do better, so I started to look into what other authoring tools were available.

Blogging packages

Google searches kept returning references to WordPress, which I soon learned, like Movable Type and Textpattern, is a blogging package that can also be used to build a basic web site. Yep, you can’t do fancy web-sites with these, but I had no intention of doing anything particularly whizzy, a bit of text and a few images, nothing more than that. After more research, I chose WordPress.

WordPress provides a step-by-step video on how to install their package through cPanel, following that was a doddle. I spent a few hours poking about, making pages then tearing them down, trying the different formats and templates, but generally the defaults were good enough for what I wanted to do. Note that WordPress can host your blog if you don’t mind using their domain name, i.e. your-blog-name.wordpress.org, or you can install on your own server as I did.

By the end of that first evening, the “Welcome to my blog” post was up and running. It really was as simple as that.

Add-on’s

Over the next few weeks I wanted to extend the blog. So more research, more following of simple instructions and finally more stress-free functionality. All for free. Isn’t that a great price? Bear in mind though that it is good practice to ‘tip’ the creator of add-on’s if they’re doing it commercially.

These are the add-on’s I’m currently using, or widgets in WordPress parlance.

• Mailchimp. Excellent for collecting mailing lists. You can use this to notify your loyal follows when you release your next ‘latest & greatest’. Mailchimp is free for small lists; charges only start when you reach a following where money wouldn’t be an issue anyway
• Social Sharing Toolkit. Allows articles and pages to be ‘liked’, mailed, tweeted, etc. by all the social networking sites that you’ve heard about, and many that you probably haven’t.
• User Photo. Allows your mug-shot to be displayed in your posts.
• Pretty Simple Progress Meter. Shows your readers how far through a project you are

The final one, and in my opinion the most valuable, is Google Analytics. At a basic level, this phenomenal piece of free software allows you to see how many people are visiting your site. In addition, if you’re interested, you can also see how long each visitor spends on each page, where they live and pretty much everything else about them apart from the colour of their underwear.

Try it!

I must confess, I do work in I.T. so I’m not entirely clueless when it comes to computers. But the ease with which these packages can be installed and the functionality they provide, and provide for free, is extremely impressive.

I hope this post has helped show how easy it is to set-up up a blog. Please look around mine and see what you think. I know it won’t win any prizes at the next technology awards, but it’s exactly what I wanted: quick, free and low maintenance.

The tools are there, so give it a try. Get blogging!