Single Parent of my Blog!!
Posted by Samit - 11/05/09 at 06:05 amThis is how my blog partnership begins.
I have been blogging now for a couple of months and have been an avid reader of a lot of seemingly unrelated blogs, though interesting. They covered topics from Tips to technology, politics to poetry, jazz to jokes, career to cricket, smart facts to lame advices, fashion to fun and what not. It’s been a great learning experience for me.
It was during this time that I picked up the idea of owning a site. Though I had been working on an account with Wordpress, and one with Blogger, two of the best platforms for new bloggers, I decided it is now time to pick up a site of my own and keep working on that.
I felt it would give me a more ‘composite’ satisfaction of “owning” something all for myself and also a sense of direction for the days to come. It shouldn’t be very difficult I thought, till I got to the brass tacks (though mind you it wasn’t really).
I’ll go back to the steps that I followed in general, one by one. Firstly, the decision had to own a web site had to b immediately followed by a domain name. It took me about a couple of months to decide and finally find one that suits my likings. It also called for a lot of reading on the net. Hmmm not really a long time for a catastrophe, isn’t it ?
What next? Once I have zeroed in on the domain name, I didn’t want to waste any time in finding a domain register. Again I wanted to find one which not only gave me a good price, but also filled up a few other requirements: requirements I didn’t know till I had started to dig into the realm of acquiring domain names, transferring name, locking domains etc. More about all this later…
With both of these decided, now I wanted to host my site.
I needed to find a host with some other specifications, one and most important of them being the capability of hosting a blog software. This again needed some more digging in, with the main contenders being Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad. After going through the features, the pros and cons of each of them I decided with Wordpress.
So, by this time, I have got my own domain and hosting space, and am in the process of installing wordpress, through their famous “5 min install”. Gossssh, it took me two weekends to complete my “5 Minutes” till I found out that one of my choices was wrong.(And mind you me being working with Information Technology, though not a coder-developer myself).I had been trying to set it up in a Windows Hosting service. Take my advice, never use a Windows hosting service if you are planning to install “Wordpress”. Even if you do not know anything about Linux other than spelling the name, my advice is still Choose Linux Server for hosting Wordpress. I understood this the hard way.
So I traced back my steps, found out my folly, re-contacted my web host and asked them to allow me a complete change of hosting server. And voila! It took me really about 5 minutes to set up my Wordpress blog ( i.e., if you do not take into account the time of uploading through ftp the 600 odd files of the Wordpress package) .
So now everything seemed to be working for me. I now began to look into good themes from the Wordpress support forums, deciding on colour, columns, and looks to ultimately select one. The requirements can be broadly classified as colour, sidebars, widgets, plug-in and SEO. I will write a more detailed article on this later.
So ultimately after deciding on one I coded/tailored the few changes required to make the template more likable and uploaded the same to my themes folder under wordpress. After that I switched from the default to this new template. I know I would have to rework on this template to fine tune a lot of things more…but that would be fine with time.
So now I have a baby, one called “myblogpartner.com” all set up but it also deemed on me that I have a long way to go. I have to nurture this baby, feed it at regular intervals, dress it up properly, get ready for occasions and prote it socially on social media networks like facebook, delicious, and twitter.
I need to submit my blog to popular websites.
I need to check the use SEO techniques to make my blog popular.
And most importantly I need to provide quality posts to help my readers with a good reading.
That a long way to go for me and my baby, isn’t it?
Just a Tip: It feels great to be a parent!!!
