Yahoo is planning to include blogs or weblogs on all its news searches providing the bloggers a wider opportunity to reach people. Weblogs are free and simple tools to help people to publish their ideas, articles, poems, comments etc on Internet. These characteristics prompt Internet surfers to create their own weblogs. But most of us do not know how to do it or unsure about the steps required for it.
To have an attractive weblog, you do not need to be a web designer or programmer and also you do not need to have any special software or skill. You can easily sign up for a weblog, choose your ID and password, enter your email address and some primary personal information, choose a template for your weblog and then add entries, upload photos. A good weblog hosting service provides a good, attractive and professional weblog.
Here is a simple method about creating a weblog, which many need to know from start to finish.
The first thing that you need to do is come up with a name for a 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 to decide on how you want your site hosted. Do you want to pay for your hosting or 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.
When you have decided on the type of hosting you want to get, but do not have a clue where to start looking? Well there are many sites that you can go to find out about hosting providers. The hosting providers have everything from user reviews to a ranking system.
After finding hosting provider, you will need a programme 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 do not fret there are a number of programmes out there that you can choose from.
There are many programmes out there which have many features like: friendly links, multiple blogs on the same page, custom headers, and template retrieval. These are all automatic, mostly support via web based pages.
HERE ARE SOME SUPPORTING TOOLS:
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 programme to help publish weblogs. They also offer a downloadable programme 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 (customisation by templates, multiple users) but is run on your server.
There are many other programmes out there to create weblogs, these three are just the major ones. Of course if you want, you could create a programme yourself to do it. That is, if you wanted to.
Now that you have your title, your hosting, and your programme 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.
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 would not want to just post a movie review in there.
Finally now that it is all said and done to get readers to your site.
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