Giving Words - Opening - Creative Writing

Giving Words

Words and Verse

Are You A Blogger?
by Cynthia E. Jones

April, 2005

An indispensable literary tool for publishing your writings to the web rather your work is personal or professional.

Blogdrive.com, just one of many blog sites, offers several key features with a free membership. Give your email, choose an account user name, password and if you are over 13 years of age you are ready to begin once you receive a confirmation email. You will need a title for your blog, a name to insert for the URL and decide what category best suits your subject matter. Later you can make changes to some of your settings in the blog configuration. Although, your sign in name and URL will not change, you might want to give some thought as you make that URL to your blog.

Now that your account is created, you are just a few steps away from being among the bloggers of the world. There are several styles for you to choose from to use as your template, if you are not up for the challenge of writing the html yourself. There are quite a selection of fine layouts with a wide variety of colors and designs with any host. Most blog sites will host your blog for free with a banner likely added to your page. If you do not like having an advertisement you can always upgrade to the premium package for a small monthly fee or you can have the entire site uploaded via FTP to your own host.

If you find that one blog simply is not enough to cover all that you have to write about, you can create more then one blog with a single membership ID and even have multiple authors to one single blog. It really isn't a ridiculous notion at all. Either of these options would serve well if you were hosting a group event with more then one participant responsible for updating.

At blogdrive.com, the WYSIWYG Editing tool makes it easy to create a really great looking post, as it gives the "what you see is what you get" editing abilities so you do not have to be a web designing guru to have a blog with a professional feel. Also available in the built in options are tag board, comments, and permalink, which is very handy if you want to create a permanent link to the side within your navigation. You can even post your entry by email. Yes, if you have an email account, the ability to access that email account and the ability to send, then you can update your blog from anywhere. Mini Mediator also gives the ability for you to post while surfing the web without going to your blogger page.

All of that still does not conclude the free membership features. You also get a contact form for you visitors to easily fill in and send to you, an optional ping to weblogs.com, an email notification for your guests to add their email IF they wish to be notified when you update and an archive calendar to access all of your past posts by date.

The abilities I have mentioned are the ones I have found at blogdrive.com but generally speaking most blogging sites offer the same key features. I suggest that you have a look around. Pick one that suits your needs with the features that you know you will use most. Here are a few more blogging sites to get you started on your own blog.