How to blog

It takes only a minute or two to register and start blogging. Honest. I will list for you the free blogging companies.

www.spaces.msn.com
www.360.yahoo.com
www.blogger.com
www.wordpress.com

The most famous of course is 'blogger', but my advice would be to stick with 'wordpress'. Blogger is owned by Google. Many people have moved away from blogger to 'wordpress' due to censorship issues. I can vouch for that. www.wordpress.com is where you would log on for the 'wordpress' free blog, and www.wordpress.org to get hosting with 'wordpress'. You can also get valuable info my checking their forum and posting your questions. I received great info when I needed it by going to that forum. Many gurus would be checking out posters' questions and giving out great advice.

Creating your private blog. it is not hard at all.

You will first need to come up with a blog name also known as 'domain name' or 'website name'. The shorter the domain name the better. I strongly advice against hyphenated blog names. When the Internet came about, many large companies were caught unawares and those savvy tech people grabbed names knowing in advance that they could fetch not thousands but millions for those domain names. If anyone had grabbed domain names such 'abc.com' or 'cbs.com', those companies had no choice but to pay millions of dollars for those domain names, they simply had no choice. They could have hyphenated their names, but not a good idea. If the domain name owner of 'abc.com' was asking 20 million and another one was asking a dollar for 'a-b-c.com', the latter would not even sell it for a dollar. So you get the point. C-span.org must have had a hard time buying cspan.org and settled to hyphenate their name. It pays to take your time thinking about the name for your blog. Yes, keep in mind that most desirable names have already been taken. but you can be creative and come up with a name of your own.

Where and how to register your domain name.

Most domain names go for $10 a year, sometimes they fall in price during sale period. (yes, even domain names go on a sale, same old gimmick!)

I would strongly recommend registering your domain name where my blog is hosted, 'dreamhost'. It is a dream company. I did my homework, read a lot and researched a lot before settling with them, and I am staying for good. There is also one great advantage for registering with them, they shield your privacy by making your registration info private, such as name, address, phone and so on and most registrars will also do it but for $10 a year per domain name whereas dreamhost do not charge you anything and they do it for you automatically. Go to www.dreamhost.com

Where to host your blog.

The choices are dizzying. The two important aspects of hosting are disk space and bandwidth. The latter is the most significant aspect. Disk space is cheap, but if your bandwidth gets out of hand, that can cost you plenty. 'Bandwidth' is the amount of data transferred from your hosting company to the computer of those viewing your site. Bandwidth is still cheap unless of course you have millions of visitors in which case you are in a position to make a side business out of it by selling books or by placing commercials. You will be sought after if you have that many visitors. I personally detest commercials and if I were ever to reach that many viewers, I would do anything in my power to stay clear of commercials. I will also recommend 'dreamhost' for your hosting for many reasons, great tech support, small company, their registration number was 500,000 when I joined a year ago and it is now 800,000. They have wordpress ready and easy to install so that you could start blogging right away. Most communication is via email and the response time is quite quick. When I bought my plan it came with three free phone support a month. I used a few in the beginning but there will be no more phone support for me because I don't need it anymore. Disclosure: if you mention to them that I referred you them, there is a bonus for me of ... i forgot, because it used to be $80, then it was removed and put back at $50. The reason why I am recommending them has nothing to do with their referral business. The only way that I can prove it is by telling you that you don't have to tell them how you came to know of them. I did in fact tell the company that I would mention their company and the referral is not the motivating factor - at all.

Design consideration:

The overwhelming number of blogs in the blogosphere are awful, because it could not be helped. They were designed before css came about. Many of them are designed with three columns, and often the left and right columns are empty 90% of the way down. Your homepage is the most prominent real estate and you should not waste it on empty columns. The solution may be going the one column only way - such as my blog, or settle for two columns and hopefully you would take advantage of the empty wasted space.

Internal links: oh no, please no! I hate them. I usually shut down a page that is riddled with those horrible links. Those internal links are nothing but footnotes and they belong at the foot of the page. but someone started it, i think it was wikipedia and everyone followed suit. It is a bad idea for many reasons (a) they disfigure your page, (b) you are sending away you readers to someone else's blog and what they find there may be more interesting and they may decide to stay there and never come back. Just mark your links with footnote numbers, such as the way we see them in books and stack all those footnotes at the bottom of your article.

Width of your blog:

My computer has three settings for screen resolutions, most newer computers have those resolution settings

800 x 600 pixels
1024x 768 pixels
1260x 800 pixels

But the width of your blog should not exceed 760 pixels. There is a reason for that. Many people around the globe are not as privileged as others, and their screen resolution is still at 800 x 600. The last time I checked the website www.w3.org, the percentage of those using 800 x 600 was quite large. To see how someone with a resolution of 800 x 600 is viewing your site, go to your computer,

start => control panel => appearances and themes => change the screen resolution.

Write down the screen resolution you have it so that you could reset it back again. change it to 800X600 and save it. Check out my website www.ziomania.com. My website is centered in the middle, but at 800x600, it has expanded filling up the entire screen. Because the width of my blog is only 760 pixels, the data does not overflow. Now check out what the website www.counterpunch.org looks like when viewed by those with 800x600 resolution. The pages did overflow and the browser has put a sliding bar at the bottom of the page so that the viewers can slide it to the right to read what they could not see and back to the left, constantly shifting to the left and to the right. If your desire is that all your viewers view your pages, then you have to settle for 760 pixels wide for your website. You will then have empty spaces to the right and left if your blog is centered or a large empty space to the right if your blog is hugging the left side of the screen, which is a much better alternative.

Centering your page: So many websites have their pages clinging to the left side and the right side has a large empty space. I think centering your page makes it look much more attractive.

Highlighting text:

All caps is not a good idea as it tends to disfigure your contour and so is bold font or font in color. The only recommended way to highlight is italics.

Note: The issues having to do with the width of your of your blog, centerng and columns do not apply to free websites. Those have already been taken care of by the company of those sites and their pages do not overflow, because they have taken into consideration millions of people whose computer resolution is stuck at 800 x 600 pixels worldwide.

Next post on [how to] will concentrate if you should have your site re-designed in CSS. The answer is yes, and the benefits are enormous. Again this does not apply to free blogs such wordpress and blogger. The companies such as Google and Wordpress have taken care of that. Stay tuned.