Tips from a weblog beginner

I just sent out a 25-person email announcement of this weblog to some of my friends and colleagues - that's probably you right now since this is only day 3 of this weblog (let's call it blog for short). To my knowledge, most of you don't have your own blog. One of my clients in Switzerland (who shall remain nameless, see below), who saw this blog, had a comment and a couple of good questions:

• I would have to call my parents more often before being allowed to share my stories with the general public... ;-)

I know what you mean. I didn't have to worry too much about that because my Dad is my only surviving parent and he's 87 and not likely to be surfing the Net this lifetime (But...you never know).

• Is it hard?

Kind of - if you do it the way I did it. First, I needed to decide among the abundance of weblog tools and services - and I'm bad that way - I did a lot of research so I could pick the coolest one. As it was, I made two false starts, trying Radio Userland and Blosxom before happily settling on Movable Type (MT). Second, the set-up was a little tricky. However, they have detailed instructions, so if you can pay attention and carefully follow instructions - always difficult for me, you'll probably have about one glitch. Then it's merely a matter of looking around to see where you didn't quite follow the instructions. There's a support forum for Movable Type which jogged me enough to help me figure it out without actually having to post a question. Third, MT has a nice-looking, web-based entry screen that lets you enter and edit your posts. Fourth, I downloaded Kung-Log a slick little OS X app for MT that lets me prepare my posts on my desktop and adds some bells and whistles. Fifth, you'll wanna put in a little html here and there but Kung-Log has a pop-down menu to put it in easily as well as keyboard shortcuts.

• Is it just a program, or is there someone else hosting it?

Movable Type is a bunch of little programs (perl scripts) and templates that you download and then upload back to the ftp site where you have your website. The MT instructions (which are html documents on your hard drive) tell you where to put the files on your ftp site and how to change a few lines in the scripts to refer to your website and your folders. I have to say that my Transmit FTP program is the best I've ever used - it lets me edit files on my computer or on the ftp site directly in the FTP window - $25. I could have tried to host the whole thing from my Mac but decided that I didn't want to deal with the Apache learning curve before starting my blog.