How to create a weblog
by Brent Todd June 2001
So you want to create a weblog but don't know how to do it or are unsure of some of the steps required for it? Well you have come to the right place. In here you will find everything that you need to know from start to finish.
The first thing that you need to do is come up with a name for your weblog. This might seem like a very trivial thing, however, your title is your site. It defines what you will write, how you will write, it could be your domain name (if you choose to have one) and above all is something every weblog needs.
The next thing you need to do is decide on how you want your site hosted. Do you want to pay for your hosting or do you want it free? Do you plan on exploring other things with your site other than your weblog? Do you want to have your own domain for your weblog? Do you want to be able to do specific things with your site like php or cgi? All of these will help you decide on what type of hosting to get.
Ok so you have decided on the type of hosting you want to get, but don't have a clue where to start looking? Well there are many sites that you can go to find out about hosting providers. However, the best one that I have come across is www.hostreviewer.com. Their site has everything from user reviews to a ranking system. You really can't get any better than www.hostreviewer.com when you are looking for a host provider.
Now you need a program to write your weblog with. Well you could write your weblog everyday and then upload it yourself to your host provider, but what happens when you have 1000 entries or want to sort them by week or month? It gets kind of complicated to do all of that by hand. But don't fret there are a number of programs out there that you can choose from.
Big Blog Tool - BBT has the most features out of any blogging tool out there. The friendly links, multiple blogs on the same
page, custom headers, and template retrieval are just some of the features included. For a small price, $15 a year, you get all of the current features of bbt, and their
great tech support. The support can be reached numerous ways, and sometimes will even contact you before you contact them. Everything is automatic so you don't have to
ftp anything yourself. It is also web based, so users don't have to install and configure tricky scripts.
Blogger - Blogger is a free, web-based tool that helps you publish to the web instantly. Blogger gives you a way to
automate the blog publishing process without writing any code or worrying about installing any sort of server software or scripts. And yet, it still gives you total
control over the look and location of your blog. The only thing they ask in return for using Blogger is a link back to their site.
LiveJournal - LiveJournal is another free web-based program to help publish weblogs. They also offer a downloadable
program to put on your home computer to publish your posts rather than through their web page. Their software is open source so numerous people are constantly upgrading
it. If you want, you can pay for the software.
Grey Matter - Grey Matter is free to use. The difference between Grey Matter and the others is that you install it on
your own server. The only requirement that your server must have is the ability to run Perl scripts. It has all of the features of Blogger and Live Journal
(customization by templates, multiple users) but is run on your server.
I am sure there are other programs out there to create weblogs, these three are just the major ones. Of course if you want, you could create a program yourself to do
it. That is, if you wanted to.
Now that you have your title, your hosting, and your program you actually have to write. What to write about you ask? Well that is up to you. It is really hard to classify a weblog into a specific category, however there are some that actually do pertain to specific ones. You can write about anything you want. If you want to write a day to day journal on what you did, you can. If you want to write a weblog about sports, you can. You can write whatever it is that you want to write.
A tip for keeping traffic though is to write about similar stuff most of the time. For instance if your weblog is about sports, you wouldn't want to just post a movie review in there.
Finally now that it is all said and done you want to get readers to your site. How do you do that? First you must go out there and find other sites similar to yours or that you really enjoy. Try doing a link exchange with that site. You can also submit your site to search engines if you like. Eventually people will come to your site if you let it be known that it is out there.