practicalities of blogging

[Jean Hollis Weber]

Donna Flood asked,
 > ... for me, blogging always comes back to the same question:
 >
 > Why? Why blog?

For some years (while I was self-employed) I published a 
newsletter associated with my technical editors' website, as a 
marketing tool. If I were doing that today, I would publish a 
blog instead.

To answer some Kevin McLauchlan's questions that started this thread:

I have one blog (on blogspot.com), but it's a general-purpose 
personal one. (In theory I have another blog, at O'Reillynet, but 
I haven't posted there in a loooong time, out of sheer laziness.)

I've been retired for several years, so conflict between my 
personal blog and my work life is a non-issue. I use my real name 
on my blog and on all my websites.

I still maintain my editors' website (though some pages are 
woefully out of date), along with three other websites. Last year 
I moved all four websites into Wordpress, which I use as a 
content management system for (mainly) static web pages, rather 
than primarily as a blog. It is quite easy to have a mixture of 
static pages and blog pages on one website under Wordpress, and 
to use one or the other as the main page of the site.

My webhost (Dreamhost) provides a very convenient one-click setup 
of Wordpress on the websites in my account, so I use that. (It 
was one of the major reasons I chose Dreamhost; at the time I 
felt quite daunted by the prospect of installing Wordpress 
myself.) For my websites, I wanted more control and choice of 
templates than I could get through Wordpress.com (the online 
service). Blogspot's offering is quite okay for my personal blog, 
so I've stayed with them.

I mainly compose my pages and blog entries in a text editor (html 
and all) and paste the result into the web interface, but I may 
begin using the "email it in" feature of both Blogspot and 
Wordpress when I'm travelling.

Mostly I don't allow audience participation, though I may change 
that and allow moderated posts in future. I've seen too much 
content spam on other sites to take a chance with it on mine.

Tip: If you go for your own website, register your domain name 
yourself (or make darn sure that your webhost registers it in 
your name). There are some unscrupulous webhosts out there who 
tell you too late that they are merely "leasing" your domain name 
to you while you remain with their service. Gisol (may they 
suffer the curse of a thousand fleas) is one of them.

--Jean Hollis Weber
http://jeanweber.com/  (other sites and blogs linked from there)