Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Do it: Beginners guide to setting up a blog

Published on 14/01/08
by Zac Echola

[This post serves a couple of purposes. First it's part of a training side project some of us media bloggers have been working on (More on this soon). Second, I thought it would make for a good Carnival of Journalism post this January. Thanks to Adrian Monck for hosting it this time.]

Blogs in a nutshell:

For the uninitiated, a blog is, in a nutshell, nothing more than a publishing platform. Think of it like a series of Word documents that you can put up on the Web instead of putting them in a folder on your hard drive. They may have as little or as much organization as you’d like, but usually the most recent post ends up leading your page.

Blogs, however, are incredibly handy for journalistic purposes. Once we set them up–a relatively painless affair, you’ll soon see–we can work on producing content without putting much or any thought into the programming that creates a Web site.

Write about anything. We can have an editor look over our work or not. We can write about news, or comment on the issues of the day or just tell people what we ate for lunch. If freedom of the press only applies to those that own the press, here, my friends, is your press.

Because blogs are nothing more than simple publishing platforms, and they
lower the bar for anyone to publish, they essentially hand a printing
press or broadcasting license to anyone with the time to speak his or
her mind with text, pictures, audio and video; People express an amazing volume of ideas on the Web. Some of it
good, a lot of it not so good. It all comes down to personal taste.

While a blog can scale to mass media heights, it also remains intimate with readers through commenting systems. You can have a conversation with your readers on your page. These conversations help us all learn.

Choosing a platform:

There are dozens, if not hundreds of blogging tools out there. I’m only going to cover three free blogging platforms in this tutorial.

They are:

Between Blogger (owned by Google) and Wordpress (An open source project), Blogger is the easiest to set up and it integrates very nicely with other Google products.

Tumblr, is my favorite blogging platform because of its simplicity. It takes no more than 10 seconds to sign up, allows for different types of posts (audio, video, picture, text, chat, etc.). It allows you to import your YouTube videos, flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter updates and so much more automatically. Most tumblelogs are microblogs, meaning they aren’t meant for long bits of text. If you’re a photographer, this is exactly what you want in a blogging platform.

Use Wordpress if you really want to know blogging inside and
out. The Wordpress platform will give you reporting tools that will
show you who has visited what on your site and gives you a ton more
options. It also requires a wee bit more knowledge.

Blogger:

If you already have a Google account, for watching YouTube videos, checking your Gmail or reading other blogs with Google Reader, you’re nearly already signed up. Just log in using the Email and Password fields at the top of the page.

If you don’t have a Google account click “Create you blog now” and follow the directions to set up a Google account.

Once you get that set up and you log in, you’ll be presented with a dashboard. The the main management area, you’ll have two links to click:

Click Create a Blog. Obviously. Fill out the forms. The address you choose may be taken so check its availability. You blog will appear at http://thenameyouchose.blogspot.com. Notice it’s at blogspot.com and not at blogger.com, where you go to administer your page.

Next, select a template that you like. This is what your blog design will be (and it’s ok, you can change your mind later).

Once your blog has been created, you can start posting immediately. You’ll see a little editor with buttons similar to a desktop text editor like Word.

When you’ve finished writing, click the publish button, if you’d like to stop writing for now and save a draft, click the save draft button. Simple.

To view your published posts and your drafts, click the Edit Posts tab where you’ll see something similar to this:

Click the view blog link at the top at any time to see what your blog looks like to others.

The next time you log into Blogger.com, your dashboard will look like this:

Once you’ve set up your blog, poke around to see what other features it has. At no point should you be afraid to push any buttons. Go ahead and mash away! You’re probably not going to break anything, and if you’re about to, Google will warn you. Plus, we’re here to help you out, too.

Tumblr:

Head over to Tumblr to set up this account. Click the big sign up button in the middle of the page. Fill out these three forms:

Done! You’re now ready to start posting different kinds of posts:

Under the Account tab at the top, you can select Theme, and select from a few templates to change the look of your blog. You can also select Feeds to start importing your content from other Web services you’ll use in the challenge:

 

Wordpress:

Wordpress is a little more complex, but you can begin heading over to wordpress.com/signup to set up your account.

Once logged in, click My Dashboard in the top navigation bar. Here’s where things get a bit hairy.

You’ll first notice a lot of menus and a lot of submenus (Dashboard, Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Users, Options, Upgrades, etc.). Don’t panic, this is why Wordpress is so powerful!

If you really wanted to, you could start posting immediately be clicking On the Write tab; There you’ll find a text editor similar to the others:

You can manage your posts under the Manage tab.

You can select different templates under the Presentation tab. There’s a lot to choose from. Try not to feel overwhelmed. This is good. Some themes let you import your most recent delicious bookmarks or twitter posts, to a sidebar (instead of your main post area), but we’ll touch on all the goodies in other tutorials (stay tuned).

That’s it!

For now, you’re ready to start writing. Don’t be afraid to click around. Don’t be afraid to ask us questions here. We’re glad to help.

 

The end. Or is it?

Please leave a comment so I know what you think about this post. After that, check out It's randomonium! Or, if you're so inclined, take a gander at what I'm reading and my del.icio.us links.

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