Archive for April, 2008

Starting a Blog: Choose Your (Free) Software

Published by Tim on April 25, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology. 10 Comments

You’ve rolled up your sleeves and you’re ready to start a blog. You’ve picked your topic — say, portraits made out of food — and you chose a blog name (FoodFace?) You’re ready to type away.

But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.

In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.

blogger.gif

Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.

If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.

blogger2.gif

Wordpress

Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.

wordpress2.gif

It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.

Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.

How To Choose?

Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.

My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).

Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)

If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).

If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Happy blogging…

NBA bloggers - bring it (to BlogBurst)

Published by Dock on April 9, 2008 in General. 6 Comments

I know that you’re out there. You have every cable channel dedicated to sports. You follow every nuance of the players on and off the court. The sound of a ball popping through a net is deeply satisfying. And you probably wear retro jerseys to better restaurants. Best of all - you write about it constantly.

You’re an NBA blogger, aren’t you?

Now is the prime time for NBA bloggers to show us their stuff. Believe me when I say that we have some seriously interesting publishing partners who genuinely want basketball content - now is your chance! If you have an NBA blog, or know someone who does, please consider submitting it to Blogburst. I assure you, we’ll work to get you the widest exposure possible!

Killed By … Blogging?

Published by Tim on April 8, 2008 in General. 2 Comments

An article in the Sunday New York Times is getting a lot of play in bloggyland this week – In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. The gist is that a few prominent bloggers recently suffered heart attacks, and the culprit could be the never-ending stress cycle created by blogging, which just might kill you.

My first reaction was: come on, New York Times, is there really a story here?

Any job that requires you to sit in front of the computer for long hours obsessively watching any kind of information leads to high stress and little physical movement. Is blogging different from day trading, online gambling, or even traditional journalism? I bet stress has taken its toll in those professions too. Or is it just that blogging is a hot topic, so you combine blogging with regular work stress, hit “enter” and you’ve got a story with legs? (Not to mention that some blogs aren’t exactly on the stress program, like the once-a-week-if-that-often Becker-Posner Blog, one of my faves.)

Yet the more I mull it over, the more I think the Times is onto something: the blogosphere does seem to pull successful bloggers toward obsessiveness and high-stress behavior.

In our network (and in the blogosphere in general), the most successful blogs are ones that post frequently and also cover the new developments in their fields. And if you want to keep up with the latest developments, you’re signing up for a never-ending barrage of information — Google Alerts, RSS blog updates, instant messages, emails, comments on your posts. And you might as well get a BlackBerry or an iPhone to ensure you can never escape. As your traffic grows so do the inputs, and the information vortex builds upon itself. The more your attention is dominated by the screen, the more you are apt to sit in one place, maybe eat some potato chips (I think I’m going to go get some right now).

I’m certainly not in a position to give health advice, but what the heck — it’s spring, take a minute to get up and walk around. Go outside and smell the air.

Try to maximize your efficiency. Some bloggers collaborate with others to cut down the work, others make sure to include good search engine optimization as a way of getting more for less.

You’ll also find lots of good tips for work-life balance out there on the Web, and the “getting things done” mavens are full of tips for making your workday (and night) more efficient (like checking your email once an hour instead of every 10 seconds).

Of course, you also can just live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful blog.