Blogging Help

[Addison]

When it comes to internet communications and blogging type stuff, I'm mediocre at best. The most tech-savy communications I can do successfully are: text, e-mail and postings like these. I had a face-book account but I couldn't keep up and dozens of people have taken it over with their weird posts and ads and stuff. If I do the blog thing I will over see the layout and colors and such but as for upkeep I'll hire someone who actually knows something.

What exactly is a blog? From what I can tell it's like an electric journal about a subject that everyone can read and comment on. Am I right or wrong? If I'm right then maybe I can do that if there's a way to set up a free blog.

I could use an outline of blogs and blogging. Especially for this techno-savy era.

 

[teacup]

(Yay this thread can help someone other than me.)
I'm new to it myself, but I think I could still give some advice.

A blog stands for "web log" I think. And you're right, you can do it about anything. Just set up a page and post. You can write about your personal life, writing, reviews, etc.

For example, my blog is about writing in general, with some of my own life in there, too.

I think a useful thing for you to do is just to look at loads of blogs, and pick up on it. A lot of people on here have links to their blogs in their signatures, so why not click and read through some to give you a good idea of blogs in general? (I'm not just saying this to make you look at my blog...that's only 1 reason ;P)


The one I use is called Wordpress, and it seems to be very easy to use so far. It's free, but there are some premium options like extra themes and customization, and having a domain name without "wordpress" in it, but the free version is all you need, I think.

 

[GeekDavid]

The one I use is called Wordpress, and it seems to be very easy to use so far. It's free, but there are some premium options like extra themes and customization, and having a domain name without "wordpress" in it, but the free version is all you need, I think.

WordPress is also pretty much the de facto industry standard. The back end of the beautifully designed site at Otherwhere Gazette? Pure WordPress. New York Times? WordPress. TechCrunch? WordPress. When you graduate from their free service and set up your own server, you can also download WordPress (from wordpress.org as opposed to wordpress.com) and set up the same blog on your own server. You can even transfer all your posts, settings, etc. from the free blog to your own blog.

There's really no reason not to use WordPress.

 

[teacup]

Oh, that's awesome.

Hey David (or whoever else knows), do you know how to/if you can see who's following you? I'm curious and can't find it anywhere.

 

[GeekDavid]

Hey David (or whoever else knows), do you know how to/if you can see who's following you? I'm curious and can't find it anywhere.

Go to the main WordPress.com site and click "My Stats" at the top. Scroll down to see followers. There are links that you can use to get more info.

 

[teacup]

I found it just before seeing your post
Thanks anyway
Still getting my head around the thing.

 

[GeekDavid]

I found it just before seeing your post
Thanks anyway
Still getting my head around the thing.

It's very feature-rich, but the downside of that is that it takes time to learn everything.

 

[Chessie]

Teacup, thank you for starting this thread! I'm also new to blogging so I look forward to tidbits of help others post on here.

I took the lunge and created a blog on WordPress just a few days ago. So far, I have two followers whoop whoop! I do want to post about my writing on it, but since I teach Yoga and am in the Ayurveda business, I'll also be blogging about that. Yoga & Ayurveda will be the majority of what I post on probably because its the niche I'm going for. But I can also see myself posting random blogs about other things that interest me, like hiking. So I think as long as the subject matter revolves around the things you are passionate about then its fine. Good luck in creating your blog, Teacup!

PS: I spent hours trying to figure out the right color background for mine, etc. And although I'm slow when it comes to these technological things, I'm finding it to be a lot of fun.

 

[teacup]

Ooh, good the thread was useful!
That's great Chesterama, good luck on yours too. It was the title that had me stumped, I found a theme I loved right away.

 

[Chessie]

I have a question for some of you more experienced bloggers. In gearing up for NaNo, I'm playing with the idea of doing a couple short pieces of my characters/in my world and posting them on my blog. None of it would have spoilers of the actual novel. I think it would help me to brainstorm for the story a bit more and I thought maybe it could be entertaining to my readers. Does anyone think that would be a good idea? Or not?

 

[Chilari]

Chesterama: Yes, I think it could work. A while back I did a challenge where I spent one hour every night writing a new story - five minutes brainstorming, five minutes planning, 45 minutes writing and 5 minutes checking before posting it. Those one hour stories proved fairly popular - more "likes" than quite a lot of other posts I've done, at any rate. And if the stories are a bit more polished than my one hour stories, I don't see why people wouldn't enjoy and share them.

Addison: Teacup covered most of it, but I'll add that the blog setup means that, unless a post is "stickied", the most recent posts appear at the top of the page. The expectation is that readers will return on a regular basis and they'll only be interested in the top one or two posts, having previosly read older posts. Sticky posts appear at the top whenever they were posted and you can sticky a post from the "New Post" or "Edit Post" screen on Wordpress.

People use blogs for all sorts of reasons. Some use them as journals in the traditional sense, recording their lives. Some corporations use them for news on their products, and some would-be journalists use them for news in their area of expertise - and some make money from this. But most people use them as a canvas to enthuse about what they're interested in - that's where we fit in. We talk about writing or fantasy, post what we've written and what we're thinking about regarding writing.

Generally, I think it's probably a good idea to keep a blog focused on one core idea, with an umbrella covering related ideas. My core idea is writing fantasy, so under my umbrella I've got writing discussion, fantasy discussion, my own fiction, a bit of publishing industry discussion and a few bits on books in general. Phil the Drill's core idea is fantasy, so he's got fantasy video games, movies, TV shows and so on on his blog.

Chesterama, your core idea appears to be applying lessons from your experiences in yoga to writing fiction (certainly a fresh approach to the topic), but you might alienate readers if you talk about one without the other - so it might be a good idea to have a "writing, with lessons from yoga" blog, and a "yoga in general" blog - and there might be some overlap of followers, but you won't lose followers only interested in writing when blogging solely about yoga, if the yoga without writing posts are on another site.

Of course, some blogs don't have a core idea to them, or have a very large umbrella, and still work; these tend to be well established blogs or are the blogs of well known individuals. Take John Scalzi's blog Whatever for example - it's in the name. He's a sci-fi author who was president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, so some of his posts relate to that side of him - science fiction, conventions, writers' rights, things like that. But sometimes his posts are completely out there - like the time he raised $600 for charity in 30 minutes by promising to wear a regency dress a friend of his made if followers donated $500 in 30 minutes - and further posts discussed the trolls and crazies who attacked him for it afterwards (they seem to think wearing a dress makes him a doormat gamma male submitting to feminazis). That was rather amusing.

But anyway, generally I think for starter authors trying to build platform, keeping posts within a certain range of related topics is the best approach.

 

[GeekDavid]

I have a question for some of you more experienced bloggers. In gearing up for NaNo, I'm playing with the idea of doing a couple short pieces of my characters/in my world and posting them on my blog. None of it would have spoilers of the actual novel. I think it would help me to brainstorm for the story a bit more and I thought maybe it could be entertaining to my readers. Does anyone think that would be a good idea? Or not?

The only downside I can see is if you accidentally post something on the blog that contradicts what comes out in the novel. For example, a short story having a character kill someone while in the novel he says he's never killed.

As long as you carefully avoid writing yourself into a corner that way, I don't see a big problem with it.

 

[Chessie]

Cool, thanks for your responses!

GeekDavid: It would be mainly to brainstorm further into the background of some characters and world building. Nothing plot related but thank you for pointing that out because its something to definitely keep in mind.

Chilari: I'm not sure if I could handle running two blogs at once, though I did think about it when creating the first one. My idea is to post about writing and yoga, but you're right to mention that I could lose some readers interested in one over the other. So I've been playing with the idea of maybe doing 2 smaller posts per day with one thing of each. Or the majority about writing and the occasional post on yoga. I'm not sure yet. But I'm keeping an eye out on what people read most and lean my posts towards that. PS: Your 1 hr fast write sounds terrific. Thanks for sharing.

 

[GeekDavid]

GeekDavid: It would be mainly to brainstorm further into the background of some characters and world building. Nothing plot related but thank you for pointing that out because its something to definitely keep in mind.

Even background can trip you up. If you write in Hero Joe Schmoe's background that he's allergic to peanuts but then have him grabbing a handful of peanuts in an inn's taproom, chances are someone's gonna notice it.

 

[Chessie]

True. So you're suggesting that the history I'm writing should be solid, right? No problem. I need solidification when it comes to all this anyway.

 

[Addison]

Sitckied? What is stickied? Or is that just a blogging term for "posting"?

 

[GeekDavid]

Sitckied? What is stickied? Or is that just a blogging term for "posting"?

Stickied is a method of keeping a given post at the top of the page no matter what other posts come after it.

You can see a similar thing happening on forums like this one right here. In News and Announcements there are several posts labeled "Sticky" and you can see that they don't move from the top of the screen no matter what goes on in at area.

 

[teacup]

MOAR QUESTIONS:

I recently created a Twitter account and linked it to my blog. I found that I had 2 extra followers on my blog, but couldn't find these followers on my blog's stats. They turned out to be (or seemed to be) my 2 twitter followers. I now have more twitter followers, but my follower count on my WordPress blog hasn't increased.

Does anyone know what's going on?

I assumed that the 2 extra followers on the blog were my twitter followers automatically added to it due to my blog being linked, but these new ones haven't shown up, so I don't know what's happened ._.

 

[GeekDavid]

MOAR QUESTIONS:

I recently created a Twitter account and linked it to my blog. I found that I had 2 extra followers on my blog, but couldn't find these followers on my blog's stats. They turned out to be (or seemed to be) my 2 twitter followers. I now have more twitter followers, but my follower count on my WordPress blog hasn't increased.

Does anyone know what's going on?

I assumed that the 2 extra followers on the blog were my twitter followers automatically added to it due to my blog being linked, but these new ones haven't shown up, so I don't know what's happened ._.

Twitter followers do not show up on WordPress, nor vice versa. The two systems do not integrate to that extent.

Dunno where your two extra WP followers are. Sorry.

 

[teacup]

Huh. Well that is odd.
Well, glad most of the confusion is over Thanks.