In this series of technical articles/tutorials, we’re going to look at blogs, what they are and what they’re used for; how and what you need to get started doing this yourself and the exact steps you need to take to set up your own blog.  Join me as we look at the basics of blogging and go through the choices you have to make when you start your blogging journey.

Introduction

Everyone’s heard about blogs and blogging, and to me it seems to be the happening thing on the internet as more and more people seek out information provided by genuine people rather than faceless web-sites which present bland information without any practical experience or application behind it.  Ok, admittedly thats a general statement, but I think you know what I mean.

Blog comes from the words Web Log which is essentially a journal, a diary entry which usually an individual makes on a web site recording some information of interest.  Wikipedia defines it as:

“A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log“) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”

Blogs exist on a whole range of subjects and interests, the best thing to do if you want to find out more is to just Google it and have a browse around at what people have done.  So having looked around at what they are, and assuming you’re at the stage of wanting to set up your own blog how do we go about it.

Well, you have two options really:

• External Blog Solution, using a blog hosting option.  There are many providers out there who will host your blog on their web sites, allowing you to create your own blog using the tools and facilities provided on their web-sites.  Now for most people, this is probably the easiest and best solution as it saves you having to get into the details of setting up your own web sites, getting domain names, playing around with file transfer programs and loading software.  However, as with everything thats provided as a standard package, you are limited to what you can do with it, and should there be problems with your hosting solution provider you may lose your blog.You can get your own blog by using sites such as
  
  http://www.blogger.com
  http://www.wordpress.com
  http://www.livejournal.com/
  
• Private Hosting Solution, where you buy some web space from a web hosting provider and install your own blogging software that people can access.  This option gives you the complete flexibility, and you are in control of what you’ve produced.  With the tools now provided by web hosting platforms, the task is far easier than having to get into the guts of writing HTML/XHTML code yourself.  Also, if you are interested in Internet Marketing and looking into creating a web presence for yourself or the products or services you want to offer, then this is the option for you.  It’s more involved, can be difficult and you might have a few sleepless nights, but really it can be done, and that is the purpose of these tutorials, to go through how I did it, step by step so you’ll have the information to do it yourself.

In the next part of this tutorial we will look more closely into the External Hosting Solution using the Blogger website(Blogging for Beginners using Blogger.com), before looking at the main purpose of this series of tutorials is How to Set up Your Own Private Hosting Solution for your blog, which will be covered in part 3 onwards.

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technicalarticles.co.uk features regular articles on my blogging journey of creating a unique web presence and sharing with my readers ideas and tips for helping them do the same. Keep up to date with the latest posts from Daniel Hunt - Join the Community by Subscribing.