conect.com

This was not going to be the first topic but the events of starting this Blog changed my mind. The technical process itself is very simple. All you need to do is access your Web Site management panel ( Cpanel is the most common) and select which of the available Blog products you want to use. You will find the Blog options listed under ‘Fantastico’ in your Cpanel.

Be careful about selecting where to install. If you place the Blog in the root directory, it will automatically make the Blog your Home Page and overwrite your index.php file if you have one. Make sure first that you make a full backup of your web site before installing anything. I download backups to my office PC as the copy of your web site on your own hard disk is really the only version that you ‘own’, everything else can disappear without warning.

I suggest you start your Blogs life by testing in a subdirectory so that you can try out the features before you go ‘live’. Write real content during your testing as otherwise you are wasting valuable time and might also lose momentum. Reworking stuff is a chore. One thing that I found useful was writing in Word so that I got spellcheck and also had an offline copy to fall back upon.

Which product to use is probably not important. They are all more alike than different. Originally I started with ‘Nucleus’. I chose it because it has the smallest install size and usually that is a sign of good design. It worked well for most functions but the default search was not working properly, so I gave it away rather than work out why. Life is too short to be bothered with sorting out software issues. The appearance of your site can be changed on the fly by loading a template written by someone else or uniquely by you. Template development is technically challenging for most people not working professionally with computers. However, getting acess to good quality free templates is easy. Personally, I like simplicity and will probably stick to the Wordpress default.

Having switched over to Wordpress, I find the interface less techy which is probably why it is so popular. However, it works best using Internet Explorer and produces some strange results under Opera, which is my preferred Browser. No doubt in a years time I will wish that I had stuck with Nucleus because it does seem a bit tighter. Anything that gives different results in different browsers is a bit of concern.

However, selecting your Blog software (CMS - content management software) is not likely to be the greatest challenge involved.
The real issues are

1. what are you going to Blog about,
2. can you keep generating fresh content; and
3. will anyone find your Blog and read it?

These are all challenges that we share in common. For myself, I will concentrate on technical and useability topics that I encounter in consulting work, try not to write just for the sake of it and trust in the relevance of the content to find an audience.

To finish off, I should point out that if you don’t have a web site already, you can use free Blog publishers who make their money out of advertising to you and your readers. Just search for ‘free blog’ in Google.

This site offers the experiences and observations of Kingfisher Pty Ltd, a privately owned Australian Internet company established in 1991.

The contents of this site are not advice. You are solely responsible for how you use the information published here.

 If you require advice or technical support, we offer this to you on a fee-for-service basis. The fee rate is $120 per hour, plus GST. The minimum fee is $35, plus GST. There is no charge for submitting a question for comment or observation on this site. All use of our services and this site are subject to the full Terms and Conditions which can be found here.