My Musings on Life, Poetry and Short Stories

I notice that the budding bloggers have a lot of difficulty in putting up their blog covering the technical requirements and have been asking for help in the forum time and again. I intend posting some simple guide for various aspects of putting up a blog, adding widgets,building links,pagerank, alexa rank, indiRank etc. I welcome questions which I will try to answer to the best of my ability. It will be in parts, divided topic-wise. In this post I start with Part-1 Basics

Before you start your Blog please know a few things about it which are very important. Blogging is a serious activity and calls for some preparation and lot of PR activities! There are so many bloggers around writing on a variety of subjects. To capture your own audience for your blog is not easy and calls for hardwork. You should be able to write something new, your own views in an interesting manner so as to attract the people to read your posts lest you are forced to close your Blog. Make sure you have the necessary knowledge, sources of information, capacity to write simple, grammatically correct articles.

Choose your Domain where you want to host the blog. There are so many like Blogspot, Wordpress etc who offer free sub-domains in your name or your own domain. You should decide whether you want to go for a pre-designed template that is available with lots of choices for 3 column or 2 columns etc or write your own HTML/XML. While the former is a relatively simple exercise the latter calls for some knowledge of HTML/XML.

Choose whether you want to write in your real name or go for an ananymous pen name. Serving employees often find it difficult to freely discuss the issues for fear of antagonizing the bosses or employers and would like to remain anonymous. In any case never disclose any personal information like telephone number, email or bank information.

Be careful that you do not violate the copyright act or get into controversies by criticizing anyone personally or by using abusive language. Whenever you write review about a commodity or service make sure to put a disclaimer that it is your own personal opinion only lest you get into trouble with the manufacturers / service providers. Taking the issue of your dissatisfaction with a manufacturer or service provider on an one to one basis directly is one thing but writing about it in a blog which is read by everyone and making the company unpopular is quite another.
(To be contd....)