It’s time for another ZunnelZ post!
This time we’re talking about blogging!
Q: Why start a blog? It takes time and you don’t really get anything out of it.
A: Blogging is a great way to meet new people and learn new things. Plus, you can stick ads on your blog to generate some revenue.
Q: Is it free to start a blog?
A: In most cases yes.
Starting Your Blog
There are two (main) kinds of bloggers. Bloggers who blog through a blogging service and those who blog server side. Bloggers who blog using blogging services are usually those who don’t have knowledge of PHP/SQL and can’t setup their own blog, don’t have money to get a server, or enjoy more easy to use and simple blogs with far less features (just posts and comments, some don’t even have comments!). Server side bloggers are usually tech savvy bloggers, companies or businesses, or people who simply want their own domain (of course you could simply link your domian to a blogging service, but that’s not in the scope of this post. perhaps we can discuss this in another post).
In this post we will only be covering free blogging services. We may or may not discuss server side blogging some other time or on the forum.
Registering with a Blogging Service
I would recommend two different blogging services:
Blogger.com
WordPress.com
I personally prefer WordPress over blogger as WordPress has far more functionally than Blogger blogs. As a matter of fact noodlescape runs off of WordPress. Not the free hosted WordPress but the WordPress you may use on your own server and domain.
But you may choose Blogger over WordPress as WordPress blogs are blocked in several areas with internet censorship. Oh and Google owns Blogger so you have a much higher chance of getting approved into Google Adsense (I think).
Getting Started with a Blog
First you must choose a topic on which you would like to write on. Or you can just write about your daily encounters and adventures online and offline. Once you have chosen a topic on which you will enjoy writing on register a blog with the blogging service you chose earlier. You may notice that the blogging services only provide something.theirdomain.theirextension URLs, that’s because they’re free hosts. If you want you may later attach a domain to your free hosts or you may host your blog on your own server and point your domain to that, but that’s getting slightly advanced so we’ll drop the topic.
Choose a subdomain (A subdomain something.something.something while a domain is simply something.something. For example, noodlescape.com is a domain while forum.noodlescape.com is a subdomain.) is that fits your topic and is easy to remember. Short subdomains and domains are (usually) better than longer ones.
Start Blogging
Once you have setup your blog with your free service of choice simply start posting! Most free hosts have simply and easy to use control panels or dashboards from which you can easily make posts. Feel free to comment here with your new blog in the comment or in the “website” field where all can see and click! I might also add you to our “friend sites” list in the sidebar.
Don’t forget to frequently drop by noodlescape to find cool ways to make your blog awesomer (is that a word? Perhaps I should use “more awesome”).
