Starting a Blog

Over at aus.gardens (a usenet group), I was asked for a quick tutorial on starting a blog. But my news reader is playing up, and although I can read incoming messages, I cannot post any at the minute.

So I thought I would post it here, in the hope it gets found. And it may be of use to any other gardener reading this who wants to start off.

Firstly, you need somewhere on the web to load your photos.

I use http://www.flickr.com/ They have a free account that will allow up to 200 photographs, with monthly upload limits for the free accounts. Once you reach 200 the old ones drop off, but they still show up in your blog.

People also on Flickr can choose to be shown your photos whenever you upload, and don't necessarily have to read your blog. There is a strong community of people who do that on Flickr, and some interesting groups. eg

http://www.flickr.com/groups/compost/

(I think you can see that without an account)

Flickr gives you your photographs in a number of sizes, ready to load on your blog:

or

(Any excuse to show off one of my irises)

You can also link to photos in a larger size, if they are too large to show on the blog.

You then need a blog provider. I use

http://www.blogger.com/

These come up with "blogspot" in the address.

It is free. You sign up and go through the steps of creating a basic blog. You pick up a html code from Flickr for your photos, and paste them into the blog posts. The photo then shows up in your posts.

The final trick is to read a lot of other people's blogs, to get an idea what it is about. The way I do it is by using a blog aggregator, where I just check in once a day and see who has updated their blog. I use:

http://www.bloglines.com/

There is a fair bit more tweaking to it than that, but I am happy to mentor anyone offlist. So feel free to contact me and I will talk you through it. Or anyone else that is interested.

My email is kapana[at]netspace.net.au

And, once again, if you want a few blogs to look at, to practice subscribing to bloglines, pop over to my sidebar, to the left, and have a look at some that I read.