Blogging for Beginners

My son was born 41 days ago and I felt it was my parental duty to show him off to the world (or at least to family and friends.) Since I spend most of my day online, I figured a blog would be super convenient (and non-intrusive) way for me to share photos of my son. Thus far, it is working out great and some have asked, “How did you do it?” Since I’m a coder, I think everyone figures I put the site together from scratch. I really appreciate the compliment, but nothing could be further from the truth. As a developer, it’s imperative that I consider all possible solutions and choose the best possible option. With a new baby, time and money (always key factors in determining the best solution) are scarce so I leveraged existing code and turnkey applications.

Registration: In another 5 years, it is going to be impossible to obtain [yourname].com so it was somewhat of a big deal to me to get my hands on [myson].com. A quick visit to godaddy.com and ~$30 later, I had the domain privately registered. Though the private registration is about $8 more than standard registration, I think it’s worth it. Ultimately, it means your personal information isn’t exposed to anyone at any time and it effectively eliminates all spam associated with the registration.

Cost: $30

Hosting: Since cost was the biggest factor in finding my host, I couldn’t be too particular when it came to options. Since I work for a MS shop, I would have really liked a host which supported .NET and SQL Server, but I knew I wasn’t going to find this on the cheap. And since I wasn’t going to find a host which supported my programming language of choice, I needed to find (rather than code) a blog. This is where BlueHost.com came in. They will host up to 6 domains for $6.95 / month. They support Perl, PHP and MySQL and they provide automatic installs of many, many products including 5 different PHP blogs.

Cost: $166 for two-year agreement

Blog: After about 30 minutes of research, I decided WordPress would support my blogging needs. Really, I only had a few requirements:

1. Text and Image Support
2. Site Templating Options
3. Offline Blog Editors Support.

Since BlueHost.com provided a free installation of the product, it was a no-brainer.

Cost: $0

Blog Editor: I wanted the ability to write and publish my blog entries using a third-party tool. Though WordPress provides online admin tools, I’ve never met an online text/html editor which I’ve liked. Thus, I chose to go with WB Editor - a desktop blogging tool. Since using the product, I’m not particularly impressed. It is super-easy to use, but I’m a geek. I don’t want easy with barebones functionality. I’d prefer complex with lots of options.

Cost: $20 (You get what you pay for)

I recently thought there may be a business opportunity here. Setting up one’s own blog isn’t difficult (heck, check out Blogger on Google.com if you want easy), but the process isn’t necessarily easy for everyone. I don’t know if personal blog setup is something that the GeekSquad does already, but blogging is becoming more and more popular so maybe someone should capitalize on it.