14. What to blog about?
Source: http://blaugh.com/2006/09/22/how-to-overcome-writers-block/
15. Pros/cons
Tumblr Posterous Blogger Wordpress
Ease of Use (4 is
4 3 2 1
easiest)
Easy clean interface (4
4 3 2 1
is easiest)
Custom domain name ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Selection of templates
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
available
Import from older blog ✓ ✓ ✓
Post by e-mail ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Posts can be private or
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
public
Easy to backup blog ✓ ✓ ✓
Use HTML ✓ ✓ ✓
Autopost to Twitter,
✓ ✓
Facebooke, etc.
Highly customizable ✓
Tumblr is the most popular for short single item posts. You’ll see that they have a number of options to quickly make a new post. You can consider it a cross between Twitter (micro-blogging where you are allowed to use a limited number of characters) and a complex blog.
I quickly set up a Tumblr site to show you what one could look like. It might be a very handy tool for sharing images, for example. You have a number of templates to choose from, each template having a particular layout. You may want to choose the layout based on the type of content that you want to have. This layout for example, is probably best for images.
You may try to post to my tumblr page. To do so, you send an e-mail to a given address. This makes it easy for several people to post to the same blog. You can edit/update a tumblr site using a variety of tools. It integrates with Twitter and Facebook. Built in types are Text,Photo,Quote,Link,Chat,Audio,Video.
Posterous spaces allows you to create a blog of your own. As you can see there are other features. I’ll address those if it’s of interest to you.
This is a samplePosterous site. Posterous is probably better to use than flickr if you have a lot of text based information. It’s also possible for followers to receive your posts directly by e-mail. It also allows you to connect your site to Facebook, Twitter and other sites so that your posts can automatically display there.
There are a number of options for posting to posterous. To send a post by e-mail, you have to use your registered e-mail address.
Blogger integrates well with other Google tools such as Google docs, calendars and other gadgets. If you use lots of Google products, this is a good option because many of the skills that you’ve developed in using the other tools will transfer here as well. If you have some experience with html, you have even more options for designing and maintaining your blog with Blogger.
Wordpress is much more complex. You can add functionality to the blog using pieces of code called plugins. There are many more settings available in what’s called the dashboard.
Of course, a crucial question is what to blog about. Well whatever you want. Find something that interests you and that (some) other people might be interested in reading about (because who doesn’t want their blog to be read?). And be consistent. You’ll probably become a better writer, family overseas may be happy to see pictures of the children, friends may want to try the recipes that you’ve recently discovered, members of the community may be interested in ordering your baked goods. You imagination is your limit.
