Tuesday, February 26, 2008
How to Start a Family Blog
Posted by Roger W. @ 1:36 PM
[Ed. Note: Thanks to my husband for writing this post. He is referred to as “tech support” by most of our family. He’s like our very own personal Geek Squad (I mean that in the nicest way, dude). So keep your eyes peeled for more technology-based reviews from Rog. Enjoy the first one!]
Our friends and family often request the latest pictures of our girl Sy or the newest thing she’s learned. Like most people, our relatives and friends are spread out across the country and even the world (West Coast, East Coast, Canada, UK, Switzerland, Asia). Sending emails everyday or even every week with pictures would be a little much. But having an online presence of some sort would solve the problem. That’s where the family website comes in.
We have a blog with our own domain name and that’s where we can post little updates. Our peeps can check the site and see that most recent pictures and read about the latest Sy-ism.
Here’s how to set up your own blog and keep your friends and family up to date.
Get a Domain Name
First off, get your own domain name. OK OK, you don’t have to, but it’s nice. Otherwise the URL your friends type in will be something like thesmiths.wordpress.com. Domain names are so inexpensive these days that everyone really should own their own dot-com name. If WordPress or any of the other free blog hosts should decide to stop being so generous, you’ll still be able to keep your domain name because you own it! My favorite registrar is GoDaddy.com. Despite the very cheeky Super Bowl commercials, they’ve been reliable through the years and their prices are very reasonable. One more advantage to owning your own domain name: you can have a permanent email address that is not tied to your DSL or cable provider nor a Yahoo! or MSN; it’s you@yourcustomdomainname.com.
Get a Hosted Blog
I’m going to recommend WordPress.com as the hosted blog platform of choice. The software is super-easy to use, it’s free (add $10 per year to use your own domain name), and their template themes are beautiful. Just go to WordPress.com and sign up. Then be sure to map your domain name to your new WordPress blog.
There are other choices if you don’t want to go with WordPress:
Get a Photo Gallery
Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish and countless others let you upload your digital pictures and buy prints. And then incidentally you can also share your album with friends and family. The bad thing about those services is that the online pictures are always really small. Flickr and Google’s Picasa Web Albums are much more online focused, allowing your visitors to easily download the large versions. I’ll recommend Flickr here because of its ease of use and great integration with WordPress (and other blogs in general). Have a photo that you want to blog about? Just click a “Blog This” button above your photo and voila. Both of these services do have limited free accounts. But for $25 more per year, Flickr will allow you to upload an unlimited amount of pictures. I like this because now you’ve got built-in offsite backup of your most important pictures.
Get a Hosted Video Service
Now that you have your domain name, your blog, a place to host your photos, what about your videos? You could use YouTube, but the quality isn’t that great. Use Vimeo instead. With Vimeo, your videos will look great and you can also easily embed them into your blog.
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With the above-mentioned services, you may want to maintain your privacy. Flickr and Vimeo both have privacy options so random strangers won’t be looking at your young one smearing green beans all over himself.
Once you have all the ingredients, it’s time to start building your site and uploading content! Customize your blog by choosing the best theme for you. Upload photos to Flickr and videos to Vimeo. (Instructions for adding a photo from Flickr to a blog post. Embed a Vimeo video to a blog post by clicking on the Embed button in the video.) Then write your first post!
Finally, this isn’t the only way to publish a family website/blog, but this is the fastest and easiest. There are software programs you can buy that will make this easy too. The best solution that comes to mind is Apple’s iLife software combined with their .Mac web service. But that’s another article.
-Roger
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February 28, 2008 @ 3:21 AM
Hanz said:
Very informative. Thanks for the insight! : )