You can get a free blog on many different sites on the Internet.

You can access a list of around 60 free blog sites by clicking here.

With a free blog all you need to do initially is to choose a name for the blog address, give the host of your blog an email address, and choose a username and password to login to it. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Wordpress will all give you a free blog with just this information. There are also many social sites that will include a blog along with a home page for free as well.

For a personal or home blog, a blog that is only going to be read by family and friends, this is the ideal blog. For someone who wants to make money with a blog, a free blog is also a good thing. Both Wordpress and Blogger are now so easy to use that adding some basic monetization to them is a breeze.

If you are going to make a living blogging, you need to understand that with a free blog you are at the mercy of the host. If a free blog host decides to terminate your blog, all the history in it is deleted and all the time you spent on it is wasted. They make the decisions and although it is unlikely you will arbitrarily lose your site, it has been known to happen.

Whether you have a free blog or your own domain blog, try to keep copies of your posts or backup your blog to keep your content safe and available for restoration. If you lose a platform or a theme or plugin, it will not matter, these can easily be reinstalled. A years worth of articles cannot, so backup or keep copies.

The next step for both reliability and versatility is your own blog, your own domain name and a host. Mostly, the blog platform is still free, but you will have to install it. This method is usually called a hosted blog signifying you are hosting your own blog on your own domain.

On the world wide web side of things, if you are setting up your own domain blog, you will need a web host and a domain name. The web host could be described as the suburb or neighbourhood where your domain lies or as a virtual filing cabinet where your blog is stored. Your web host is just a computer with special software that uses a protocol or language to display content that your browser can connect to. Your computer communicates with your host (like an encrypted phone call or even a fax) when you upload, paste or edit a post.

The domain name is your web address. You will need to pay a fee each year for the domain name and for the web host to store and serve your blog to the World Wide Web.

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Lets start with some basic blogging vocabulary. To understand what a blog is, you first need to know the terms blog, platform, domain, and web host. A blog is a website and the easiest website for people who are not programmers or webmasters to use.

The word Blog, which is a shortened version of weblog, generally refers to a specific type of website with a series of online articles, called posts, presented in reverse chronological order. This means the last post that you publish is presented first on the front page and prior posts of the month often show below this. When the month turns, the older posts are archived usually by month name and only a new post for the current month will show. These details can be changed by configuring certain pages in your administration panel.

Configuration simply means to change a command in the code. To keep thing as simple as possible, which is what makes blogs so easy to use, this will often be accomplished easily through a simple question and answer form. Sometimes it will actually be necessary to “code” although luckily you will often have a numbered list of instructions on a read me document and can cut and paste the code by numbers. As you learn more, this will no longer make your heart sink in dread, you will confidently explore and experiment with your blog without getting into too much trouble.

In addition to the word blog, which is a catchall for everything associated with it, there are specific meanings for parts of it, when other words are added to it. On the technical side of things, you will need a blog platform and/or a specific platform template. On the aesthetic side, you may prefer a specific blog theme or skin. On the interactive side you may need several blog plugins. Themes and plugins are not core requirements for your blog to work.

A blogging platform is the computer software program that allows you to publish posts and to update your blog. Your template is what is used to design the functional structure of your blog. Your theme is described as the look and feel of the blog, from colour scheme to font size, header picture and sidebar displays. Themes are also often called skins depending on which blog platform you use. It is relatively easy to modify a theme. It can be dicey and tricky to risk modifying the template or core code of the platform.

Plugins extend the functionality of a template making many different tasks easy to do. There are plugins that can catch spam comments, display advertisements, make it easy for people to bookmark a post, cache content, add a site map or add simple tags.

There are always two sides to a blog. The front end, or what people see on the Internet and the back end, or the blogs administration panel. The front end looks pretty good without you doing anything to improve it other than adding text to a post and deleting the sample data that is there to help you get started.

The administration panel is the control panel where you will enter a post, edit one, and publish it. It is where you can add categories and assign your posts to them, where you can add links to your blogroll, where you can choose a theme or install a plugin and where you can enter your own contact details or add other users to your blog so that it can be shared. It is also one of two places where you can configure the code to make your blog display its content in different ways.

From a non technical viewpoint, a blog is often called an online journal because many people use them to record events consecutively just as you would in a diary or journal.

Due to the many new platforms and plugins a blog can do so much more than this now and blogs are used for many purposes including business information, news publishing, novel or essay writing, commercial selling, tutorials and portfolios.

Fill in the email form to subscribe to updates to this blog. We’ll send you a free report and the password for protected posts.

Popularity: 9% [?]