Historian’s Guide to Blogging - Part One
This is a three part guide to those wishing to start a history blog. In fact, it can be a guide for blogging on any subject and not just the humanities. It’s for beginners so I’ve kept the information basic.
Firstly, lets look the software you can use. Possible blogging platforms are Wordpress, Movable Type and Blogger. For an assessment of each one lets look at what .net magazine wrote about them in a recent feature:
Wordpress: Five stars out of five.
In the last couple of years, the Wordpress platform has surged in popularity, partly due to a mistake by Six Apart in how it licensed Movable Type. It has great community support and is frequently updated. Recently, there have been some concerns about how secure it is, but the recent releaser of Wordpress 2.5 has seen significant imporvements.
Moveable Type: Four stars out of five
Moveable Type is the granddaddy of content management systems. The company behind it, Six Apart, provides good support and a hosted version of the software called TypePad. Movable Type is different to other blogging platforms in that it creates static pages of content, rebuilding your site each time a change is made. This has led to question some how scalable it is for bigger sites.
Blogger: Three stars out of five
Owned by Google, Blogger has a large user base and an easy-to-use interface. It’s a hosted system that provides access to templates designed by some of the best CSS developers in the industry. Although basic, it provides all the features of a modern blog and is an ideal starting point for those unsure of their CMS requirements.
Okay, so these are short reviews of the three main blogging platforms with Wordpress on the top of the .net magazine list.
This blog is created using Wordpress and it really is easy to use. Also, I’ve noticed for some time that Google loves Wordpress. It indexes the pages in its search engine really quickly. I presume because it is well-written, light-weight code that the Google bot loves swimming through.
So where are you going to host your blog? No, you don’t keep it on your PC: You place it on a server, either free or at cost.
Two of the platforms above offer free hosting and a free sub-domain address. For instance, you could sign up to Blogger and have a URL such as www.myhistorysite.blogspot.com.
Dave Tabler, author and webmaster of the successful Appalachian History blog, uses the free service offered by blogger, of which he says:
"Conceptually I’m a more than a little uncomfortable with the notion that one company, Google, holds all access to my work. In terms of the programming aspects of Blogger, it’s quite workable. I’m not a heavy duty programming maven, so my first preference is to focus on the writing and worry less about the tech side."
I personally wouldn’t recommend using a free service because it has limitations: There’s only slight theme customisation allowed and you can’t upload any plugins.
And you’re most certainly not be able to get hacking at the code.
At this point in time as you are starting off this may not mean anything to you, but sometime down the line as you become more familiar with blogging, webdesign and the software at hand you’ll want to expand your site and add better design or functions for users. Realising the limitations of the free service you may well then decide to go for a paid option, at which point the you’ll realise that there is no easy way of transferring your content.
It may be though that you’d like to sign-up with a free service to get a feel for this blogging lark. Fine, go ahead and have a play around.
Click on the following links to do that: Wordpress and Blogger
But for those that would like a paid service read on.
Using a paid hosting service
Firstly, it is not expensive. The cost of hardware has gone down dramatically over the last ten years. Also, there is a lot of competition between hosting companies so there are some great deals out there. Expect to pay maybe £30-£40 ($60-$80) per year. You may well even find a cheaper alternative.
The hosting provider I have used for years is 4uhosting. As you can see from their site their basic option is £30 per year with a domain name thrown in. I would recommend this company through personal experience, but, as I wrote, there are many, many hosting companies out there for you to pick from.
Picking a domain name
There are a number of prefixes available such as .com, .org, .net, .info and national ones such as org.uk or co.uk.
Which of these is best? It’s entirely up to. Although for a history site you’ll probably want to avoid .com because you are not a business.
When you chose a domain name keep it to one term such as www.myhistorysite.org, you can pick something like www.my-history-site.org but it’s best not to. Internet users are used to typing out domain names which are one long term, rather than a series of words joined together by a hyphens.
As a point of interest, you will purchase a domain name from a hosting company at the same time you rent some server space; but, in actual fact, the domain names are registered by a select few non-profit organisations around the world who sell these names to you via hosting companies. This internet business is a clever old thing 
Setting your blog up.
Okay, lets say you’ve brought yourself some webspace and a domain name for one year. Now lets get the blog up and running. I’ll show you how using some images.
Cpanel is a very common user interface, although it’s not the only one - Plesk is another, but we’ll stick with Cpanel is that is what I’m familiar with and, as I wrote, it is very widely used.
When you first enter your backend you’ll see a user interface like this. At least, you will do if you are using Cpanel.
Your hosting company will email you details of how to get into the administration end of your site when you sign up with them
Now scroll down until you see the Fantasico button and click on it
This will bring you to the following interface. Make sure you select the Wordpress option from the drop down list on the left:
Fill in the following information as follows:
1. Install on domain. You should have already bought a domain. Before though it is available to use you probably need to add it to the ‘Addon Domains’ section in the main Cpanel interface.
2. Install in directory. Don’t worry about this as it will do this automatically.
3. Administrator-username. Over to you on that one…
4. Password. Make sure you pick something secure. For instance ";;.T|U,=>Y9~" is a lot more secure than just "happy". Get a variation of upper and lower case and throw in some numbers and strange characters. Don’t worry about remembering it as in the next stage you will have the option of forwarding all these details to an email address of your choice.
5. Admin nickname. Whatever you want.
6. Admin email. Again, whatever you want.
7. Site name. The title of your blog.
8. Description. You can leave this blank if you so wish and add it later. This is a single sentence that describes your site.
Now click on the finish install button.
There you go. Put in your email address in the box and send yourself the information you have previously entered. Keep this email for future reference.
You will now have a website with the basic Wordpress installation that will look like below. I’ve kept the subdomain I used for this tutorial here, and which I’ll also be using in part two.
And that’s it! Away you go…
Easy, er?
In the next installment we’ll go through some basic design tips to follow. I don’t want this to become a guide to using Wordpress because there are already plenty of those out there on the internet. Hopefully though I’ll be able to present to you with some basic rules to follow no matter what blogging platform you use.
One Response to “Historian’s Guide to Blogging - Part One”
DD: This comment was added but the anti-spam block was too strong. The anti-spam block settings have now been changed:
‘This is a good start for blog newbies. With regard to domain names, I frequently recommend people buy .com, .net and .org, if they can. While their site may not conform as a true commercial business, network or non-profit organization, it makes for a good way to 1.) protect their domain name and 2.) cut down on confusion. Don’t you think the US government wishes they had reserved whitehouse.com a long time ago? :-)’
By AndyEditor on Jun 24, 2008