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Perplexed comments on Delayed Solutions Game - Less Wrong
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I want to start writing a blog. Or perhaps several blogs dealing with a variety of subjects. For the most part the blogs will be intellectual musings, tutorials, reviews of books and things I find on the web. The usual.
I have several things to decide. Hosting is a big one. Should I use one of the standard free packages - Google's Blogger, for example - to start out, or should I get my own domain name and pay for server space somewhere. I don't intend anything fancy - just HTML text and graphics plus reader comments.
Another decision involves promotion and roll-out. The subject matter for at least one of the blogs will be of interest to LW. Should I start it by writing a sequence of top-level posts here and then copy the content to my own blog later? Can I do that?
One constraint is money. I'm on a small fixed income. Anything more than a few $100 per year is beyond my means.
I'm sure there are other "gotchas" that a beginning blogger needs to worry about. What are they?
The blogs I have been most captivated by as a reader have been those where the creator's personality is readily perceivable in the content... that is, those with a distinctive voice. (Of course, the blogs I have been most turned off by have had this property as well.)
On the one-blog/several-blogs front, it might be worth thinking carefully about just how strict the line between subjects is, and how likely you'd be to write a post that belonged in multiple blogs. If the likelihood is more than negligible, you might look for hosts that simplify that sort of thing.
A lot depends on how confident you are that you really will generate content and collect readers. At least, I can't see why having a paid-for domain is better than something like Blogger (or livejournal, or, or, or) for minimal content. Especially if money is tight.
I'd suggest giving serious thought to the kind of reader-community you want to create... both what kinds of people, and how you want them to interact, and how much work you are willing to put into making that happen... and select your hosting and promotion with that firmly in mind.
Treat this simply as evidence rather than a solution to anything: I have personally found free Wordpress blogs to be very simple, customizable, aesthetically pleasant.
I thought WordPress was simply free authoring and blog maintenance software, not free hosting. But it occurs to me that compiling a list of free blogging software (with user reviews) and compiling a list of free hosts (with strings attached, presumably) together with reviews of the various kinds of strings - well that would be very helpful.
There's two parts to wordpress. The software (http://wordpress.org) and the hosting site (http://wordpress.com/), which uses the software and is free (I think maybe they have pay options too). The conditions don't seem to be very restrictive.
Burn-out and writer's block are a couple of things that come to mind.
One thing you should think about is what the aim is of the blog. Do you want to simply get your thoughts down, have a place for permanent high quality material you've written, do you want to entertain people, get the feeling of having lots of people read what you've written? Several of these require significantly different approaches to the task.