This post from 2000 is, obviously, quite old. I no longer recommend blogging platforms like Typepad, you should get your own WordPress site and blog. I started blogging for GNN in 1995, which was bought later that year by AOL. We used FTP and HTML, of course. My American Borders dispatches were “realtime reports from the road” which were brand new, then. For a history of the blog take a look at http://www.artofblog.com/history/. Enjoy!
At the San Francisco Writers Conference today I spoke with the Wild Writing Women on crafting the personal essay. My contribution was information on how blogging can help you practice your writing skills, gather information, become an authority on your topic. Here are some helpful links.
http://typepad.com Get a weblog here, at TypePad. I like it the best because they have fabulous templates and you can get set up quickly. I set up this blog in 1/2 hour. 1 month is free. Then about 5 bucks a month. 20 bucks if you want to publish a lot of photos.
http://bloglines.com This is the RSS news reader I use to subscribe to the weblogs I’m interested in. Try it. This is how people who subscribe to your blog may read the weblogs you publish. This is a free service. To subscribe to my blog, click on SUBSCRIBE on the Bloglines home page, and enter the URL of my weblog, http://carlaking.typepad.com/weblog/. It’ll show you the RSS feeds (subscriptions) that are available, and ask which one you want. For some odd reason, my blog is listed 3 times. Choose one. There’s no difference. You can then PREVIEW the feed, which will show you what you get, or SUBSCRIBE to the feed. Under OPTIONS on the same page, choose a folder – make up any folder name, maybe WRITERS BLOGS, and then choose SUBSCRIBE (just take the defaults for the rest of the available options). You’ll then see that you’ve subscribed to my blog, and you can visit it online anytime. You can do this for any blog you like. Don’t worry, this is a “browser based” blog reader, so the information lives on the browser, on Bloglines server (their computer), not on your computer. It’s like browser based email, which runs on Explorer, Firefox (Netscape), and Safari. Enjoy.
http://rebeccaspocket.com Rebecca Blood literally wrote the book on blogging in 2003. Three years later the book is kind of old news, but the basics are still there. Her weblog is a great example of a general blog. I suggest you BE MORE SPECIFIC since you want to cultivate your expertise in the topic on which you want to write, right? So that you can convince the world, especially your agent, editor, and publisher, that you are the expert. I handed out Rebecca’s 10 Tips for a Better Weblog in the session today. I would add a #11 – you’re a writer, so do your best to write well and certainly proofread before you publish to your weblog.
I’ll be talking about weblogs, Internet, and other hi-tech topics for writers on April 1st (no fooling) at the Wild Writing Women workshop. Join us!
Useful info about blogs
Rebecca Blood’s Weblogs: A History and Perspective page
Wikipedia’s weblog definition page.
About RSS Feeds: I can’t find a good basic introduction to this topic but the BlogLines site ABOUT button states it pretty simply: “Bloglines is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.” You really don’t need to know anything about RSS feeds except that if your blog tool has one — which all of them do (TypePad and competitors) — your readers can subscribe to your weblog. So don’t worry about it, already!
How to find good blogs: Technorati is a weblog search engine.
