Today, January 6th 2010, the UK has been gripped by ’snow fever’. The main TV news, tabloids, social media networks, everything and everybody has had just the one subject to talk about – snow!

The image accompanying this article is of my koi pond and garden, taken with my Nokia N95 mobile phone at 8.00am. Looks pretty doesn’t it?

Due to the weather (we’re talking snow here of course) I was forced to stay at home. This gave me the opportunity to do all kinds of online tasks – including writing for various blogs and websites and also updating the keywords on my ‘main’ website – www.davcomedia.co.uk -though to be honest, they were all labours of love.

I could just have easily done all of it from an internet cafe, the local library, McDonalds or a thousand other places with free wi-fi hotspots.

Publishing content to the internet is now so easy and I strongly recommend anyone who is thinking about blogging to stop thinking and start blogging.

All you need is a blogging platform (WordPress is my preference), a subject to write about and access to the internet. That’s it.

What are you waiting for – get blogging.

Ian Davies
Editor

Regular readers of Blogging Crew know we are evangelical about using WordPress. Frankly, we love it! However, although downloading the core files is pretty easy, setting up everything else can be a little daunting, and more than a little time consuming when all you really want to do is start writing!

Thankfully, Davco Media can take all of that hassle away from you. They are now offering a new service, which includes hosting, installation and setting up WordPress for you.

The cost of the package is only £24.50. That’s a special offer price until December 31st as it usually costs £39. It really is a brilliant offer!

You can find more information about the package here and let Davco Media set up your WordPress blog in no time.

Don’t know much about Drupal? Here goes…

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize content on a website. Drupal powers a wide variety of websites, including…

Straight out of the tin

Drupal is ready to go from the moment it’s downloaded. There are dozens of freely available add-ons to privide impressive functionality, including:

Whilst Drupal can’t challenge WordPress when it comes to the quantity of themes available, there is still plenty of choice. Take a look at drupal2u.com (over 230 FREE themes), alldrupalthemes.com, templatemonster.com (207 premium themes) and topnotchthemes.com (premium themes) to give you some idea of what is available.

Blatant plug

Although the software is free, a Drupal site requires 3rd party hosting (unlike Blogger for example). I offer a brilliant blog hosting package. For further information please take a look HERE.

In this instance the sin is I haven’t defined for you what the blogging buzz words, jargon, call it what you will are all about.

If you are an experienced blogger feel free to yawn. However, if you’re new to the blogging game please read on and take a look at this glossary.

Archives
This is the area of your blog where you store your past posts. They are normally stored in the sidebar. Spookily enough my archives are cunningly called “Archives” and you will find them towards the bottom of the sidebar over on the right. In most blogging platforms you can specify how your archives are filed and displayed. The standard is monthly and this is probably the best option for most bloggers. You will note my archives only display articles from April 2009. There’s a very good reason far that. I started this blog in April 2009 although I am not a blogging novice.

Blog
The term “blog” is an amalgamation of “Web Log” indicating how blogs were originally used, as a “log” or diary published on the internet. Blogs now cover every subject known to man, with many different writing styles and themes for business and/or personal users, and also refers to the generic term for the technology used to create them.

Blogging
The physical act of creating blogs and writing articles (or posts).

Blogging Platform
This refers to the software used to create the blog. There are many different options on the market. Popular platforms include Wordpress (this blog uses Worpress and is my personal preference), Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Drupal and Joomla.

Blogger
This is an easy one… someone who blogs!

Blogosphere
An overall term given to blogs on the internet.

Blogroll
A set of links to other blogs. In essence, the specific author’s recommended reading list.

Business Blog
A business blog is usually set up with a particular business goal in mind. The purpose of a business blog is to develop relationships with a pre-defined target market.

Category
Each individual post can be categorised under one or many Categories set up in blog, allowing visitors to easily find posts on a particular topic. You can find my categories in the sidebar over on the right.

Comments
Unlike “traditional” websites, bloggers can easily interact with their readers. Readers can leave a comment about individual articles (posts) written by the author. The author can respond to comments too.

Domain
The primary address of a website or blog. The domain for this blog is http://bloggingcrew.com

Feed
This refers to an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) which allows you to subscribe to receive information from a specific blog you consider to be of interest. You can subscribe to my feed by clicking on the orange square located above my sponsors ads at the top of the page.

Permalink
A permalink is the permanent ‘address’ of a post on a blog which allows it to be found and referenced easily. For example, look at the ‘address’ bar in your browser right now and you will see the permalink of this aricle is http://bloggingcrew.com/2009/04/blogging-glossary/.

Ping
A blog “ping” automatically informs blog search engines and tracking services when a blog has been updated. The search engine then visits the blog to immediately record and index the new content – meaning search engines literally contain up to the minute information of what is being written about. This can be set up to ping automatically when new content has been published or you can manually “ping” them, using services such as Pingomatic or Pingoat which will inform several search engines at the same time.

Post
An article appearing on a blog.

RSS
Really Simple Syndication is a brilliant method to share information with others. See “Feed” above.

RSS Reader
A piece of software needed to receive and read RSS feed subscriptions.

Splog
A “Spam Blog” automaticaaly created and filled with a random set of words with the sole intention of creating links through to a separate “target” site.

Trackback
A trackback is used to help follow and track conversations between different blogs on a specific subject. As an example, if I commented on a post on somebody’s blog, I can include a trackback which automatically sends notification to the original author and creates a link to my post in their comments section.

URL
Stands for Uniform Resource Locator – effectively the address of the page on a website or a blog.

In contrast, Google’s Blogger platform has always had a very limited choice of templates. I mentioned on previous posts that my blogging career started by using Blogger, and the lack of templates really frustrated me. That was one of the main reasons I moved over to wordpress.com (the ‘lite’ version of the platform) before settling on the full fat version of Wordpress, complete with all the whistles and bells.

However, an ever-increasing band of enthusiastic designers are shamelessly modifying some of the very best Wordpress themes and modifying them to use on Blogger.

If you are a Blogger format user and would like to move away from one of the ’standard’ themes take a look at the choice of templates at eblogtemplates.com. You might just find the ideal theme for your blog.

Now everything is going well it is VITAL you don’t lose the entire content of your blog.

Irrespective of the platform you’ve chosen make sure you have an offline archive of all your content, so for whatever reason, if you lose your blog you can restore all the content. If you own your domains you won’t lose your traffic because you can restore everything to how it was before the problem occured. Don’t let disaster strike you!

If you’ve opted for WordPress (my preferred platform) there’s a brilliant plug-in that lets you set up automatic WordPress database back-ups, and you can download it from here.

This plug-in allows you to back-up your WordPress blog directly to your PC or the server it’s hosted on. You have the option to have the file emailed to you too.

You can also automate the process by scheduling the back-up hourly, twice daily, once daily or weekly. Alternatively, you can do it manually if you prefer. I have set my blog to be backed-up once a day automatically. Better to be safe than sorry.

If you found this article useful you can SUBSCRIBE TO MY RSS FEED.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Google’s Blogger is an excellent platform to blog for free. However, it does have an annoying navbar as “standard” which makes a blog look a little amateurish (in my opinion that is).

 
However, if you have a Blogger blog and don’t like the navbar it can be easily removed.

A Reason To Remove It

It looks more professional without it: Depending on what your purpose for blogging is, you may want to remove the Blogger navbar as it’s obvous the blog is free-hosted and less like a professional site worth taking seriously.

A Reason To Keep It

It makes editing a little bit easier: You can login directly from the blog itself, and don’t have to worry about logging into the main Blogger main site first.

How To Remove It

If you’ve decided that you definitely want to remove your Blogger navbar, it’s actually a very simple process that any non-techy person can do. I managed to do it with my very first blog and I’m certainly not a technical brain box!

Just follow these steps:

1. Open your Blogger dashboard.

2. Go to your blog’s Layout settings > Edit HTML

3. Look for:

/* Variable definitions
====================

4. And above that add:

#navbar-iframe { display: none !important; }

5. Save your settings and open your blog now. The navigation bar will be gone.

Easy peasy!

This article is written on the basis of you being a new blogger, and I would certainly welcome any established bloggers reading the post to share their experience and knowledge with different platforms in the comment box below.

What is the purpose of your blog? Business, fun, hobby, news? Are you intending to blog long-term? Do you want to make money from it?

Free Options

As you would expect of a free service flexibility is a little restricted. The choice of themes and widget-functionality is limited (though more and more designers are modifying themes from other platforms to use on free service blogs) and you get a clumsy-looking domain by default, such as yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com. I started off with Blogger, moved on to WordPress.com before settling on WordPress.org (self-hosted service).

Paid-For Services

In addition to the choice of themes, Wordpress has a plethora of plug-ins and widgets available to add functionality to your blog, enhancing your readers’ experience when visiting your site… or frightening them off if you over-do it!

Although WordPress itself is free, you will have to pay for independently hosting your blog. This will only cost you a few pounds per month and there are hundreds of suitable companies out there, though please beware not all hosting companies will host a WordPress blog. If you are based in the UK I recommend using UKHost4u where a WordPress blog can be hosted for only £3.99 per month and up to 4 blogs for just £5.99!

There are several other blogging platforms available, some free and some paid-for, including Movable Type, TypePad, Joomla, B2Evolution and Drupal to name just a few. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, though with the exception of Joomla (which I struggled with) I have no experience of using them. As I mentioned earlier I am a WordPress fan and comments from experienced bloggers using other platforms would be really appreciated. There is a huge choice of excellent off-the-shelf themes (at the time of writing 678 ‘official’ themes available to download directly from WordPress) and a quick Google search using the term “free Wordpress templates” will literally reveal thousands from various sources. Consequently, you can get an excellent-looking blog up and running using a free theme. However, if you want some degree of exclusivity, “premium” themes are readily available too.You can pay as little as a few pounds right up to the-sky’s-the-limit if you want something completely exclusive to you.

If you are going to be an occasional blogger or you’re writing purely for fun, one of the free blogging platforms such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com should meet your needs. The same applies if you are unsure about blogging long-term. A free option is ideal if you want to ‘dabble’ before becoming a serious blogger. Likewise if you’re not tech savvy, as you don’t have to mess around with any coding, and with this type of platform you don’t need to worry about hosting. You write, click a button and your blog post is live on the internet.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a definitive answer and I would always suggest the “best” depends on what you are looking to achieve from your blog.

A Blog (“web log”) is usually written by one person and updated regularly (in theory at least). Blogs tend to be written on a specific topic, and believe me there are blogs on virtually any suject you can think of – even knitting needles! Some of these topics have spurned whole communities, putting people into contact with each other where they can share ideas, learn new skills, and even do business with people they’ve never even seen or spoken to from anywhere around the globe.

An initial glance at an average Blog (if there is such a thing) might not reveal too much, leaving you with a feeling that there’s very little going on. However, digging a little deeper often reveals a real goldmine of information. A click on ‘Archives’ opens a list of articles written by the author going back to when the Blog started.

Every new article (post) written goes to the top of the front page. As more content is added each post goes down the page until it disappears from it. However, it hasn’t ‘died’, it just goes into the ‘Archives’ of the blog. Think of the ‘Archives’ as an easily accessible filing cabinet. You can read those old posts, now located in the ‘Archives’, by looking on the ’sidebar’ (over on the right of this blog) or the ‘categories’ section, where posts are saved depending on the subject or content. The most recent articles are at the top and the oldest at the bottom.

Most Blogs (though not all) allow readers to comment on posts. The purpose of my blog is to help you with all aspects of blogging, so it makes sense to engage in conversation with my readers. You can give me feedback on virtually everything I write by clicking the ‘comments’ link at the bottom of each one of my posts. You leave your name, email address (which isn’t displayed publicly) and a link to your own blog or website if you have one, as well as your feedback, comment or question, essay. Try it now. I respond to EVERY comment!

One of the best ways to start a blog is read plenty of others for inspiration. Leave a few comments, ask questions and bookmark your favourites. However, the very best way to learn about blogs is… start your own! You do not need to be a technical genius to start one. It really is very easy. If you can write, you can blog! Thinking about the subject you’re going to write about is often the hardest part of starting a blog! That’s worth a whole post in itself.

That first blog was put together for free using the Blogspot platform. It was a great place to start and its failure was entirely down to me – not the platform. Blogspot (or Blogger as it’s also known) is owned by Google and it really is a sinch to get a blog up and running. Go on, give it a go. If you struggle you know where I am!