Blogging for a second income - does anyone else here do this?

vetstudent

Read some of this thread and I would love to have my own blog but dont know where to start! Do you have to pay for the site?

Angel_Jenny

I am on blogger and that is free - quite simple too. Even I can manage it!

vetstudent

thanks, now to think of a name....

red_devil

i have an idea for a blog something i heard on the tv at the weekend cant see anyone else doing a blog on this so how to capitalise?

floopnoodle

red_devil wrote: »

i have an idea for a blog something i heard on the tv at the weekend cant see anyone else doing a blog on this so how to capitalise?

Hmm, start a blog?

red_devil

whats the best platform?

quinechinoise

red_devil wrote: »

whats the best platform?

Depends on how much effort you want to put in! How long's a piece of string...

The free options, with minimal effort, are usually Blogger and Wordpress. Honorable mention to Tumblr.

If you seriously want to code the entire backend yourself, I'd always go with LAMP. I'm not really a Microsoft fan... lol

daz501

quinechinoise wrote: »

Depends on how much effort you want to put in! How long's a piece of string...

The free options, with minimal effort, are usually Blogger and Wordpress. Honorable mention to Tumblr.

If you seriously want to code the entire backend yourself, I'd always go with LAMP. I'm not really a Microsoft fan... lol

To anyone reading this looking to get into blogging...

I think, as a beginner, it is best to customise a WordPress theme like Twenty Twelve as it will always be supported even when WP does one of its updates. Free WordPress themes can sometimes suddenly no longer work.

WP is otherwise very robust and just as easy to customise as Blogger. in fact, if I were starting out today, I'd go for WP. The Twenty Twelve theme has responsive design (optimised for mobile devices) and is easy to style too. Much better than Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven There are loads of tutorials out there online.

Whatever platform you go for, always make backups of your template or directory in case you make a mistake. You can "break" a WordPress site very easily with wrongly inputted code. In fact, I broke my dashboard last night and couldn't login! It was no bother since I simply pressed CRTL & Z in my Dreamweaver file and reverted to a previous state.

In summary - go for a parent theme and make your own changes and hacks. It makes no sense to build a theme from scratch because it has already been done. As a blogger you're more or less a marketer, so why get bogged down in code?

I have heard of LAMP and am wary of it because it is a Microsoft product (LOL)! There's another issue altogether. Don't even get me started on Internet Explorer. It's a developer's nightmare. Good thing I am not one!

quinechinoise

daz501 wrote: »

I have heard of LAMP and am wary of it because it is a Microsoft product (LOL)! There's another issue altogether. Don't even get me started on Internet Explorer. It's a developer's nightmare. Good thing I am not one!

How is it a Microsoft product? Surely that would be WAMP? Do dish the secret - I'd hate to think I've been preferring MySQL over SQL, etc, for years now without solid irrational reason! (Deliberate oxymoron, there.)

Second the despair over MSIE though. Absolute nightmare trying to accommodate earlier versions. Even the great MS can't kill them off fast enough. lol

daz501

quinechinoise wrote: »

How is it a Microsoft product? Surely that would be WAMP?

WAMP! that's what i was thinking of!