Beginners who want to learn how to blog and establish their own Blog must consider some factors to get a clear idea whether their purpose would be served through blogging. They must ask themselves whether the blog is the one they are searching for or any other medium would do. This questions them – Is a blog right choice? They can clarify for themselves by just noting some important features required for Blogging.
- Writing is what is involved in maintaining a blog. User must enjoy writing which in turn helps them enjoy Blogging. You might start a blog just for the fun of it but it might be a time waste. The user needs to have a message to communicate through the blog which makes the purpose complete. For this user must have good writing and communicating skills to present the topic in his best way.
- A focus on how a blog can be started is important. However, many types of Software are available in the markets which give a kick start in this process. A blog has to be maintained and hence availability of time is necessary for a user.
- To deal with a variety of softwares required to set up a blog, one must have a thorough knowledge to tackle their failures too. Hence technical ability must be handy in order to run the blog without any trouble.
- Consistent on-going activity, creativity and hardship in maintenance are required in the blog to attract new readers.
- Choosing a nice topic is the next step. User must conclude whether to land into one special topic or a variety of topics to be dealt in a single blog. It is advised to take a simple, popular topic which is growing topic too. The topic must have enough content related to it to keep the blog on and on with its posts continuously.
- When a nice topic is chosen, there comes the role of Platform for a complete set up. A blog can be set up by using free services like blogger.com, wordpress.com or by creating own domain or by having an own hosted blog. The choice is left to the user and it depends on – goals and strategy of blog establishment, budget and technical abilities of the blogger. It is cheap and simple to run when a hosted blog is the choice. But it is less controllable and configurable. While the stand alone blog platforms provide full control and adaptability.
- Choosing a Domain Name is the next important decision to be done. Goals and objectives of the blog, source of traffic, security and simplicity affect the choice.
- It might be overwhelming to the user to choose software when everyday a new tool is introduced into the market. Tools are required to project softwares like Statistics, Blog Editors, Plug-ins, News aggregators etc, which stand as a special feature to the new blog created. Each feature can have a separate tool for its set up like sitemeter, google analytics for statistics, ecto, blogjet for blog editors, bloglines for aggregators etc.
Also note that if you want to learn how to blog and you want to make something more than just a hobby, you must prepare for spending some time almost every day for researching, creating articles etc.
I don’t know what you guys use to check crossbrowser compatibility for your web sites. For Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrom etc, is easy. Download the browser -> install -> check. But what about IE and especially IE6 ? I had some hard days finding a tool that allows me to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE6. I’ve struggled with BrowserShots till one day when all became clear.
I want to tell you today about about a tool that made my life easier from the day one since I used it. I was able not only to test IE6 but also IE7, IE8 and even IE5.5 if that matters. I’m talking about IETester from DebugBar.
Although the headaches remained the same with Microsoft’s browsers, at least I was able to test the browsers fast.
I don’t know if this tool is old and you already knew it, but for me was like a revelation and I thought this is a good share.
Thumbnail from here.
So, of course this being my first post I’ll be talking about blogging.
Blogging is a phenomenon in which a personalized website called blog is updated regularly with the thoughts and ideas with people online. It also involves collection of different links to the webpages in that website. Blog is similar to a Web Log. Blogging for many years prevailed like a craze in the surfers but now it has become a mode of entertainment to publicity, to media, to business and to anything and everything.
Basically, a blog started like an online journal which listed recent updates of any topic in that journal. Starting a blog might cost just a little or even might be free sometimes and is useful and applicable to quote a wide variety of things.
Why do people blog:
- A blog can be used an advertisement mode and thus enhance the publicity and popularity of a new product launched;
- It is useful to obtain comments, advices, review, opinions on the products or services rendered by a company in their blog;
- It acts as a great stress reliever to those who would like to just pen down their feelings, experiences, ideas and thoughts for no reason;
- It has established well as a great money earning path for the internet users;
- A blog often contains images, videos, music, audio along with the text content which makes the user get news as lively and lovely as a media produce.
A blog not only serves as an information provider but also is interactive in nature. Several people online can jot down their comments on the blog and articles of the blog and thus behave as a bridge between different groups of people worldwide. Blogging has to be done regularly to keep your blog live, current and useful in the internet. An outdated version of your blog may not attract any surfer. Adding new articles regularly, frequent posts increase the traffic to the site and publicize it well in any search engine or news mails or bulletin boards.
A significant amount of work is involved in setting up a blog and also in maintaining it regularly. A number of guidelines, rules and tools are specified to the user for setting up a new blog. All of them have to be followed in order to set a blog properly and breaking of which, might turn hazardous to the blog presence in the internet. There are many services like blogger and WordPress which help the user in creating a new account and blogging made easier. It just takes a couple of minutes to register in one of these servicers and get a new blog ready. All that a user has to think of is a topic on which he would like to start the blog. Blogging in its age of 11 years has seen many dimensions like from an online dairy to an outlet of thoughts, from a journal to fun and entertainment source.