Blogs are great tools. When combined with a search engine, they allow businesses and individuals to communicate in ways previously unthinkable. Sure, the web has been around for a while, but Blogs are allowing anyone to post. (Some may say that is a bad thing. And, as is often the case, I agree that it can be abused. But, when used responsibly, it is great.)
In the spirit of Blogging, I wanted to share what I use to bring the Professional Snapshots blog to the world. It is a combination of LunarPages (for hosting), WordPress (for the blog itself), several plugins (to add features to WordPress) and Adobe Contribute (to write the blogs).
The following is a more in-depth look at each of the tools.
Web Hosting
I like and use LunarPages as my web hosting company. They provide cheap, fairly reliable hosting for small to medium size sites. I’ve also used their dedicated hosting services, which work quite well. There are two things I really like:
- They have over 30 open source programs for everything from blogging to content management systems that you can install with the click of a button. I love the convenience.
- They are one of the few value hosting companies that provide a customer support phone number. I’ve called them on several occasions and while the wait times are a little long, I’m always able to talk to someone that can answer my questions. No matter how much I enjoy technology and automation (and I enjoy them both immensly) nothing beats talking to a live support person when needed.
I know that several others work just as well, including ImHosted, etc. but I started with LunarPages and haven’t had any reason to switch.
Blog Choice
WordPress is one of the free programs you can install through LunarPages. There were several others to choose from but after visiting their sites and searching around on the web, I chose WordPress for its general popularity. I find that with popularity comes better support from the company itself in the way of new features, as well as support from plugin developers, theme developers and software developers (see the Writing Blogs section below). The neat thing about WordPress is that you can download it (or have it installed by your hosting solution) from WordPress.org, or, if you want an easier way to get your blog rolling, you can create an account and have a blog hosted on WordPress.com.
Additional Blog Features
As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I like WordPress is due to its vast resource of plugin developers. It is fairly easy to install the program and even easier to add new features. Photo viewers, polling systems and Podcasting are just some of the easy to use add-on features.
Writing Blogs
The hosting solution and blog platform are both critical choices, but for me, the most important was the tool for writing blogs. Over the months, a blogger can write hundreds of posts. In my world, that means doing so when offline, being able to easily copy/paste text from other places, keep track of my drafts, etc. While the web-based administrative interface that comes when you install WordPress isn’t a bad solution, for me it wasn’t quite flexible enough. When I copy/pated text in it often brought in the formatting, which was difficult to remove, even with styles. It also didn’t allow me to write the blogs offline and still see the template (I would have to write them in Notepad, Microsoft Word or some other program and then copy/paste, which caused the problem I mentioned above).
So, I went searching for a different tool. I looked at several free programs but none did quite what I needed. Then, I ran across an Adobe product, Contribute. Contribute is typically used by non-technical people for updating web pages, but the most recent version also allows me to write blogs. I couldn’t work without many of my other Adobe applications, including Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash (the list goes on and on). As a result, I gave Contribute a try.
I like its ability to easily connect to WordPress. It downloads the template and allows me to write the posts offline and still see what they will look like when posted. Then, when I am ready, I can upload to the blog with the click of a button. The few downsides include a difficulty synching up with the posted time correctly and a general lack of inserting custom HTML to do any special formatting. The other downside is that it isn’t free. While it won’t exactly break the bank, its $150 price tag requires a certain level of commitment to your blog.
Overall, I really like it though, enough to make it my primary writing tool.
There you have it. That is how this blog is posted up. It obviously isn’t a comprehensive tutorial on how to start your own blog, but if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to post comments!
