Blogs and Blogging

Blogging is a great way to express your thoughts and ideas.   Although most blogs have a very limited audience, writing offers personal rewards and the knowlege you are participating in one of the greatest social and communication revolutions in history.   

For businesses blogging has become an essential marketing and promotions tool.    Cost effective and direct, blogs can connect customers and businesses in a powerful and personal way.    For excellent insights into corporate blogging as well as the medium in general read the book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel called "Naked Conversations".     Better yet, just head over to Robert's blog.   He's one of the most prolific bloggers around.

Have you been thinking about blogging?   Why not just get started right now?   Here are two free, easy tools that'll have you blogging in under 15 minutes (yes, really!):

Blogger.com        Wordpress.org (click on "download")

For more about blogging here are some posts I've made over the past several years over at my own blog see:  Blogs and blogging

Are you blogging about your local city, state or region in a way that would be helpful to travelers?    Please drop me a note so I can link you up to some sites that feature local voices. 

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Google has a great feature where you can add a free blogger blog to your website.  WordPress offers more powerful content management features than blogger blogs, but is a bit harder to set up and learn.

Here are directions for a free blogger blog.  This was designed specifically for domains hosted at Godaddy.com but similar will work at most registrars except for Verio where you’ll need to use the IP and not ghs.google.com 

Setting up a free blog that will be hosted at blog.example.com involves TWO basic steps.   First setting up the blog at blogger.com, then configuring the DNS at Godaddy to direct people to the blog as if it was at your website.   The existing pages at your *website* will be unaffected by these change though be sure you have pages backed up for good measure.  

1)  Set up account or log in to existing Google account at blogger.com
2)  Create new blog with blog address (URL) “example.blogspot.com”

Stop Now if you just want a blog and don't care about matching the name with a website

3) Under “advanced settings” choose “custom domain” and enter in box:     blog.example.net

a) Next, head to your Godaddy account and “manage domains”.  Select   example.net
b) Click on “Total DNS Control….”
c) Create create CNAME record
d) Enter Alias name:    blog.example.net
e) Points to Host name:     ghs.google.com