Thursday, June 30, 2011

Blogging 101

I love blogging.  I always have.  Not only the content writing but the puzzle of designing them as well.  But the main reason to have a blog is to have fun and share your fun.  Yes, you need a readership or some capacity.

Now, I’ve played with blogs and websites for years now and it’s cool to have people comment on what you’ve written.  Hence the popularity of Facebook and Twitter where you socially interact with people.  It’s fun. 

Since I’m writing about books and journaling life’s daily events, I tend to have more content in my posts.  I use to use Geocities way back in the start of personal web pages on the Internet (yes, grandchildren, I’m that old).  Then the idea of an online diary was what users really wanted so you could update your site much easier and we had good ‘ol Live Journal and Blogger which both showed up in 1999. MySpace was soon after.

Then the idea of having a nice designed weblog came up and people started putting money into domain names and styling their own blogs with self-hosted software. It used to be Moveable Type until they stupidly decided to charge for services. Now most big name companies use Wordpress for their blog.

I use to like Live Journal a lot because of the social networking interface.  However, it wasn’t easy to find people unless you knew them and they knew you.  With Facebook you’re able to search for the person you went to elementary school with, which works much better for connections.  Plus, users don’t have to write long blog posts.  Twitter doesn’t make you do much more than link share or say something clever. 

Now that we have the social networking capability of Twitter and Facebook available, the ability to share your blog posts is much easier.  But which one should you use?  For the librarians, teachers, writers, book reviewers and such who have blogs I read, they mainly use Blogger, as I am now.  However, Wordpress makes such sleeker, more modern looking blogs and I hate to leave it as my main blog service. 

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