October 5, 2009 by kberman
1. Setting up blogs in WordPress. com is free. But you can’t use the domain name of your choice. Your blog’s url will be namechosen.wordpress.com. For example, this blog’s url is coralcayblogs.wordpress.com.
If you want to use the domain name of your choice, you have to use wordpress. org and pay to have your blog hosted. While the cost of hosting these blogs is nominal, setting them up isn’t easy and requires someone who is a programmer. I am not a programmer but I use a great guy who lives in India. He isn’t able to give you a quote until after you have emailed him about your requirements. I will forward your requests to him in the beginning. (changemaker.kathy@gmail.com)
2. To set up your blog, go to wordpress.com. Sign up and remember the username you choose is permanent. You can have man blogs with this username. But one email address can only be used once with each username.
3. I always recommend having a notebook that you keep all your blog details in. Be sure to write down your username and password.
4. After you have your blog set up, you will be on the dashboard. This the place where you will choose everything for your blog. The first thing I do when I am starting a new blog, is to go down on the left-hand column and choose appearance. This is where you will the theme for how your blog will look.
5. To help you and give you ideas for your blog theme, I took some of my wordpress.com blogs and put a different theme on each so that you could get an overview of some of the themes. Click on heading or page Coral Cay Blogs List. (In case you didn’t know when the type online changes color that means you can click there for a direct link to whatever page it is linked to.)
6. After you have chosen a theme, you can begin to write about anything you choose. Click on new post, write it, and then publish it. You now have a blog!
7. For ideas, read How to write a post 1 (even if you can’t write) and How to write a post 2.
8. The best way to learn about your blog is to practice and you will learn that blogging is very easy.
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October 5, 2009 by kberman
Two excellent articles in Fortune Magazine report my favorite aspects of blogging.The articles are entitled “10 Tech Trends” and “Want Truth in Advertising? Try a Blog.”
The reasons I love blogs are:
(1) I have a world of experts at my fingertips. In the past 10 years that I have been reading blogs, I have not made any purchases for our home or for personal use, read any books, watched any movies, done any research without consulting my free experts in each field.
(2) I feel powerful again in the knowledge that individual people do have power over the world we live in (for example, the Trent Lott experience.) I love the way that blog writers know that those reading their site have the ability to talk back. When was the last time you talked back to the TV or the newspaper?
By the way, I live in the Ft. Lauderdale area and newspapers here are feeling the heat. The last time I gave it up, the newspaper called with an offer of $1.50 for the week for 6 months. I did say yes to that. I am worth more to the newspaper as a reader of their ads (which I’m not) than as a reader of their content. I also get the news seconds old on my RSS news sites including NYT, BBC, etc.Why do I pay for the newspaper? I love the human interest already available for me to read.
(3) I never was a huge user of email. It works great for business but is labor-intensive for personal relationships. I prefer people in person. But with my blog I send out my messages to the world of many readers so it is quite a time saver. Also, since the people reading my blog can answer me back for all to read, I get instant feedback if I choose to. For the present, I have comments to my blog shut-off but do have published email.
(4) My fourth reason to love blogs is that we live in a sound-bite world. Posts to blogs are generally short. Over the years, although I read a lot, I started long ago seeking out the best parts of the book and skipping the rest. Blogs simplify this for me by having titles. RSS feeds are amazing as I can choose to receive a short explanation with each title. Did I mention again that they are generally free?
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