How to Start a Blog
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James Joyner | Wednesday, January 5, 2005 |
Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has published the fifth installment of a pretty good guidebook of interest to new or undiscovered bloggers:
- Part I — Before You Begin
- Part II — The Beginning Bloggers Toolbox
- Part III — How to Become an A-List Blogger
- Part IV: The Art of Marketing Your Blog
- Part V – Owning a Micro-Niche
There are a few things that I’d quibble with and some of the early steps Joe recommends are “nice” but not necessary. For example, starting with your own domain and a great template are a good idea, but most of us started on Blogspot and grew out of it–although Atrios and others are still doing quite well for themselves there–and tweaked our sites as we went along. His general advice about quality and the power of networking, though, is well heeded.
See also these previous OTB entries:
- Blogging Tips
- Blogging Tips II
- Blogging Tips III
- Three Months!
- Building a Better Blogtrap
- Blogging Advice
- Blogging Advice II
- Blogging Advice Redux
- Blog About Boring Stuff
- Climbing the Ecosystem
- Link Policy
- One Year Blogiversary
I’m sure there’s more in the archives somewhere, but it’s hard to locate things in an archive of 9000-odd posts! Most of the OTB links include links to other bloggers giving their advice, as well.
(Updated to include the 5th installment of Joe’s series.)
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Also, include part 5, Owning a Micro-niche.
Don't forget a fair warning of the kinds of spam robots, which clog comments and trackbacks with silly or disturbing material. Also, someone should do a good peice on breaking down server stats.
and while I'm on the subject of servers let me get one more thing of my chest, the information available over the internet concerning MySQL and php is very limited. My server comes with a turotial but even that is generic. There are obviously master bloggers who have achieved greatness in manipulating these tools but they aren't giving uip their secrets. This is where the race comes in.
Zed: I think the vast majority of us just farm that part of the operation out. Kathy Kinsley at BlogHouse takes care of that for me.
If you use Moveable Type, I found a nice plug-in that has (so far) completely stopped spam. It uses a randomly-generated numeric code that has to be entered before the comment is published. It's been running for me since 11/12/04. Here's a link that points to more info:
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