How To Create A Free Blog

Blogging A Year Later

russelljamiesongmailcom — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:13:27 +0000

Since the last post, a year has passed and I have now created around fifty blogs on WordPress. When I say blogs that is not entirely accurate, many of those ‘blogs’ are just websites that happen to use WordPress as their content management system and their owner would never call them blogs. For reasons of commerciality all of them have been self hosted rather than being located on wordpress.com

In around three months WordPress will complete the integration of WordPress and WordPress MU (Mult-user). I wonder what impact that will have on the ‘non-commercial’ status of wordpress.com blogs. Will WordPress allow us to install plugins when there are no technical difficulties in doing so? Time will tell.

Ten Reasons to Blog

russelljamiesongmailcom — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:11:58 +0000

1. Publicity

You can use to blog to publicise yourself, your upcoming novel, your company. You are your own brand. Your blog can be a key promotional tool in establishment your online identity

2. Resume Replacement

A blog can be so much more than a resume. Certainly it can have a career history, references from ex colleagues or clients. But it can also have pictures, videos and case studies and links to other material. There is much greater scope to demonstrate your capability.

3. Personal Article Repository

A blog can be used for sharing articles expressing your ideas. These can be public or restricted to members only if you want to share ideas with colleagues. Rather than having the same conversation with multiple colleagues the blog can give them a quick way to get up to speed on your thinking

4. Improve Your Writing Skills Through Practice

Most of us write poorly. I know I do. However with practice I am improving. Practice may not make perfect but it does make steps in the right direction

5. Gathers and Organize Your Thoughts and Ideas

The discipline of writing forces ones to organise one’s thoughts and really think through the implications.

6. Solicits Feedback

Somebody one day will read your blog and comment apart from the spammers. It might even be useful or instructive.

7. Fosters New Relationships

Through blogging you will meet some new people, maybe follow their blogs and finally develop online relationships. Possibly they will be like-minded individuals or maybe contrarian to your views. But interesting nonetheless.

8. Self Expression

Some of us have the need to express ourselves: whether verbally with friends or through the written word to a wider audience. A blog can satisfy this need.

9. Self Learning – Embracing Technology

It is opportunity to get on the internet and become a contributor. With a little bit of learning you can learn to create article and then promote your blog

10. Fun

It is fun to blog. Especially it you get good feedback from others

Welcome to Free Blogging

russelljamiesongmailcom — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:38:09 +0000

At time of writing WordPress is the number one blogging platform with 3.7 million new users, 2.9 million new blogs and 9.4 billion page views in 2008 at wordpress.com

Not only do Automattic, WordPress’s creators, provide great blogging software they also provide free hosting for your blog which would normally cost you around $5 to $10 a month.

Why do they do this?

They do get something in return.

Assuming you maintain your blog and publish regularly then they get more traffic to their domain wordpress.com.

However, it is not clear how Automattic plan to monetize the traffic. So far they have resisted putting advertising on the site.

Their plan might be sell up in the future to Yahoo, Microsoft or Google for a few hundred million but for now they are concentrating on producing great blogging software.

Their latest innovation is WordPress TV. Check it out.