talkingCode

My publicist, and the right way to blog

When I thought about setting up a blog I immediately went to Blogger because I knew the name and because, since they’re part of Google’s happy family, I could use my existing Gmail account to sign in. I wrote my first posts, then spoke to designer, SEO wizard and philanderer Mr. Rahman, who was both shocked AND appalled that I would write content for Blogger rather that host it myself.

See, I’m mostly writing this as therapy and experiment but in the unlikely event that I want to ‘make something’ of this site, it’s apparently crucially important that I host the blog myself. In the spirit of experiment, then, and in order to fully immerse myself in the whole blogging experience, I’ll be taking advice from Maruf as to the best way to make my blog a commercially viable project. I won’t give away all the man’s secrets, but the following is obvious. You will need:

• A domain. 34sp are cheap and cheerful but (it turns out) lock you in to hosting with them if you buy a domain from them
• Hosting. 34sp kinda have you over a barrel on this one, but that actually turns out to be no bad thing. They have a nice Plesk control panel, host on Apache (supporting things like mod_rewrite), and you can even run Rails (FastCGI) on their platform if you so choose. Access is all FTP / Web based, which is sucky but functional. Free e-mail and databases to boot, so that’s all pretty satisfactory
• Blog Software. 34sp also provide a WordPress installer, so that’s what I’ve used.
• Comment spam protection. The reCaptcha plugin for WordPress does this nicely
• Some SEO tweaks, apparently
• Time. I don’t have a lot of this, so how often I’ll post remains to be seen
• Inclination. I’ve got at least some of this

So here we are, rehosted and ready for action. No doubt in the coming weeks I’ll be persuaded to plaster the page in adverts for Viagra and enter into dodgy reciprocal linking agreements with notorious spammers - can’t wait. All in the name of science, don’t you know.

ftw?

Right. So. Here’s the thing. I work in ‘internet stuff’, software, digital media, etc.. Actually doing that for a day job does two things for you - it keeps you looking for The Next Big Thing for the purposes of exploiting it, and makes you feel anxious about your own obsolescence. The only way you’re going to keep up is to give things a go and find out what, if anything, you’re missing.

Take blogging. Please, somebody, take blogging. There’s an argument that says that the only people actually sitting down and reading blogs are the people who also happen to write them. A little community of mutual back-patting and reassurance. There’s a counter argument that looks at the number of blogs that show up in the top 10 search results and concludes that bloggers, with their series of niche contributions to human knowledge are actually making us better informed as a race. I no longer have to look for the website of some guy who spends his life installing Linux for help on installing Linux. I just find a blog post of somebody who happens once to have done that and maintains a blog.

So here am I. Looking for the next big thing, avoiding my own obsolescence and, where possible, contributing to human knowledge by reporting my niche experiences. I’m pretty sure there’ll be an initial flurry of posts and it’ll die, but you can’t say I didn’t try. Well, I mean, you could. You’d be wrong. It’d me more accurate to say I should have tried harder…