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The Key To Blogging

by Aaron Tan

So, you are inspired to start a blog? You're in luck as there are several blogging tools. Mostly, people will save their online diaries on the blogging sites. Alternatively, they can buy space from web hosting companies to keep their blogs. Here's how you can get started.

spaces.msn.com

MSN Spaces is a beta blogging tool from Microsoft that is well-integrated with a MSN Messenger Beta and Hotmail.

MSN Messenger Beta will notify people when you've updated your blog. Friends can preview your blog from their copy of MSN Messenger Beta. You can also post from Hotmail.

Other that publishing your thoughts online, you can list your recommendations for music, travel or books, and find new friends from other blogs.

www.blogger.com

At this free site bought over by Google two years ago, blogging is a breeze. Create an account, name your blog and choose a design template. If you have your own web server specify the file transfer protocol (FTP) settings and account information during set- up and Blogger uploads the pages onto the server.

www.livejournal.com

A good place for beginners. Joining the site is free. You get basic features like user profiles, basic postings with mood icons and privacy controls. Pay US$2 (S$3.30) a month for more features such as surveys, custom themes, sub-domain, e-mail address and text messaging.

www.movabletype.org

Free for non-commercial sites, Movable Type is an elegantly designed software with customised features not found in Blogger. You need your own web server and domain name.

The free version lets you create up to three blogs, with features such as archiving, e-mail notification and integrated file uploading. The paid version, with online support and discounts on future upgrades, is available for US$39.95. If you do not want the trouble of installing any software to create your own blog, try Typepad (www.typepad.com). It offers the full features found in Moveable Type as well as mobile blogging for US$4.95 a month.

www.diaryland.com

This blog site offers free online diary hosting that will be a sure hit with all. Everything that needs to be done during the creation process is online, so no software download is required.

You can customise the hypertext mark-up language coding of your website, upload images or lock your diary. But you don't get advanced features found in paid tools.

Brag about your blog

Once you have your own blog, you need to tell others about it, just like you would if you had a personal homepage. You need to let Web visitors surfing for a blog to find yours.

To do this, first submit your blog's URL to regular search engines like Yahoo and Google, as well as blog search engines like Blogdigger (www.blogdigger.com), Bloogz (www.bloogz.com), Technorati (www.technorati.com) and Blog Search Engine (www.blogsearchengine.com).

You should also update your blog frequently to attract readers. What you write should be succinct and use a good title or headline. Web surfers have short attention spans, so you should grab them the moment they reach your blog. If you ramble on and waste their time, they'll just go on to another blog.

Extracted from Digital Life.

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