Blog Lafayette

So far in this ongoing series of blogging tips, I have looked mainly at the mechanical side of blogs. The platform setup and so forth. But frankly, that stuff is the easy part. The hard part? Writing your blog.

Did I say hard part? Yes, I guess I did, but that really that shouldn’t be the case. It all depends on what you are blogging about. If you have a blog dedicated to “How to clean your carpet”. You may run into a problem finding content. You can only write so many blog articles about how to clean your carpet because there are only so many ways to do it. But, if you have a blog about life in general, you have a much larger subject area to write about! Sometimes people have a hard time coming up with a subject to write about because they are not looking at all of the sources of writing ideas that exist in their day to day life and in the world around them. What did you do today? How did you feel about your day?

I am a member of Virtual Online Learning, a group dedicated to teaching how to do many assorted Internet related things. Among those topics is blogging. In a recent Go To Meeting session, Danna Crawford, the founder of the group gave a great presentation on all of the different sources of content we have available as bloggers. Following is a shortened list of the areas she spoke about.

• Childhood
• Teen Years
• School
• Family
• Towns/City
• Vacations
• Concerts
• Deaths
• Births
• Neighbors
• Events
• Celebrations
• Parties
• Styles
• Weddings
• Divorce
• World and Local News
• Politics
• TV
• Magazines
• Headlines

She also spoke about using a strategy where you finish a statement such as:

• I read …
• I did not agree with …
• I completely agreed with …
• Did you hear about …
• On this date in …

Make these into Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions. We each have the answers to these questions wrapped up in our own lives. When you look at writing a blog from this perspective then you can find much more to say than you may have first imagined. Try one or more of these ideas today. And don’t worry about writing to match James Paterson or some other author that you know of. The goal is to write. The craft of writing well comes with time. Or at least I hope it does. That is what I am counting on for my own writing. How well I write ten years from now will be entirely different than the quality of my writing today.

Have fun blogging and have a great Lafayette Week!

As part of writing this blog I am constantly in search of new and interesting people and things to write about. But even in the course of looking for the new I still revisit the already known favorites. One such is the local Lafayette blog known as Mommyonfire.com. This is a very well put together blog site on the whole. You can tell that the author of the blog, Natalie Snapp, truly cares about what she is writing about. Most of her posts are about her family and her faith. I especially enjoyed her post from today. It is in response to answers she received to a post from the previous week. The question was “What do you love about Jesus.”

I know that there are many different beliefs in our community of Lafayette. I am not preaching to anyone to believe the way I do or the way Natalie does. That is for better men than me to do. What I am saying is that if you want to read a blog that consistently shows what real passion for a subject looks like then you need go no further than Mommyonfire.com. As I find more blogs in the Lafayette area, I hope that all of them will be as well written as her blog. If you know of any other local bloggers, please comment to this article and share the URL of their blogs. Or if you have a blog that you write, then please share it with me. A little shameless self promotion won’t hurt you any! I love the idea of a community of bloggers in the Greater Lafayette area and I would love to have a comprehensive list of all of them to publish in my blog, with all of our differing viewpoints in spotlight!

You have decided what your niche is going to be and what kind of blogging platform you are going to use. What comes next? Now is the time to make sure that your blog has a look and style that you can be comfortable with. That means picking a theme for your blog.

All blogging platforms come with a basic theme set to choose from. If you are going to be writing a blog about what you and your friends did last week or what you had for breakfast this morning then pick a theme that is simple but fun. My wife is a fan of books and writing. Her blog, http://www.seasonedwithtime.com/hisandherblog/ has a theme based on writing paper and chalkboards. It is fun and has a more personal feel and it reflects who she is. My blog theme is more squared off and official looking. I am trying for a professional look. If I were writing about baseball then I would possibly have a theme with some baseball imagery incorporated into it.

The point I am making is this, your theme should match your niche and your goals for the blog. If you want to make money or be taken seriously when you offer information and opinions then choose a professional theme. If all you want to do is vent or have fun then choose a fun theme.

Depending upon which platform you decide to use to set up your blog, you can have quite a selection of themes to choose from. If your blog is a WordPress blog, go into the Dashboard, then Appearance, and then Themes. Once in the Themes section if you want to find more themes to use then go to the Install Themes area and perform a search. WordPress has many free themes available for use, and many themes that can be purchased as well. Purchasing a theme gives you more options and more tech support for the theme. Each blog platform has its own method of navigating and changing themes.

Whatever your platform, it is important to take the time to look at the themes available. Now is the time to make sure you like the way your blog looks to the world. This is where you start to make it YOUR blog.

Sometimes it is easy to get ahead of yourself. Today I am going to take a step back and talk about something that should be decided before installing or setting up your blog.

The first thing you should really think about is, “What is your niche”? What do you care about? In order to write well you need to be passionate about your subject. If you really get into cars and you know a lot about what makes different cars tick, then start a blog about cars. Make it about what you like to talk about when it comes to cars. If you really like what you are writing about, what you have to say will probably be more interesting. Most people like to read blogs that are written by people who are excited about their subject.

Are you funny? Then write humorous stories about things that make you laugh. Be nice of course. People love to read articles from people who know how to make them laugh.

You get the point. The blog you are creating is an extension of YOU. Make is yours. Make it unique. When you start to put your words down for all the world to see, the best you can possibly do is to be yourself. Unless of course you are a split personality with two dozen different characters living within your head. Who knows, maybe you could make it work for you. It would, after all, be your blog and your words.

What is a blogging platform? A platform is simply the computer program that produces your blog content and publishes it to the web.

There are several blogging platforms available to use. A blogging platform can be hosted or non-hosted. If your blog platform is hosted, it means that the platform is stored and runs on the blogging platform’s own server. This includes Blogger.com, Typepad.com, WordPress.com. If your blog platform is non-hosted then it means that you are paying a third party web hosting company to host your platform and content. This can include WordPress.org, MovableType.org, Joomla.org, and Drupal.org. An example of this might be a Godaddy or HostNine account that you pay a monthly fee to have your WordPress.org blogging platform installed on their server.

The pros of using a Hosted platform are as follows:

1. They are easier for beginners to use.
2. They are usually free to use or at least cheaper.
3. You don’t have to maintain the site with upgrades and backups. The platform does this for you.

The cons of using a Hosted platform are:

1. You have limited control the site.
2. You you have limited or no ability to change appearance of text and layout by changing HTML and CSS attributes.
3. You have a limited number of page themes to choose from. A Theme is simply the overall look and feel of your page. Your theme may be puppies and kittens in the background if it is for your personal thoughts like an online diary or it may be a magazine like theme for you to post news and photographs of events that you want to highlight.
4. Some Hosted blogs can look less professional. This is highly objective but it is a popular perspective from many in the blogging community.
5. Archiving can be less user friendly.
6. Blog article URL addresses/permalinks can be less search engine friendly because they are auto-generated by the platform and the user has little or no control on changing what the auto-generated address will be.

As you can see, there are a few cons to the idea of using a Hosted platform. A Non-hosted platform has both positives and negatives as well.

The cons of using a Non-hosted blog platform are:

1. You must be comfortable with using and manipulating HTML and CSS.
2. You are responsible for maintaining your site. This includes upgrading to the latest and most stable platform when available and it means diving down into the coding and setup of your site to make sure it is as secure against cyber attacks as possible.

I chose to put the Pros of using a Non-Hosted platform last because as you may be able to see, I am more biased in favor of this approach. I use a Non-Hosted WordPress.org setup on a HostNine server. I like the control that comes from being in a Non-Hosted setup.

The Pros of the Non-Hosted blog platform are:

1. Greater control of the HTML and CSS on the site. The user can manipulate the attributes of these codes to make the site look and act exactly like they choose.
2. The user can control the blog article URL addresses or “permalinks”. Controlling what the URL says goes a long way to making your articles much more search engine friendly and easier for searchers to find your content as well. It is much easier to remember an article that uses “www.bloglafayette.com/how-to-plant-asparagus” in the URL address than “www.bloglafayette.com/?p=201″.
3. You have the ability to add plugins to enhance that abilities of your site. You can add plugins that tell you how many visitors you are getting and what they are looking for. You can use plugins to include events calendars that will show your readers what you will be doing in the future.

When it all comes down to it, choosing a blog platform is about you. Do you want more hands on control of the blog site or less? What do you plan to do with the blog? Do you need more plugins or less? Do you want to get your hands inside the technology of the blog platform or do you run kicking and screaming from the thought? If you are looking for simple, fast, and easy but a little less control use a Hosted sollution. If you want more control then use one of the Non-hosted platforms.