A new blogger’s report card

I started this blog almost two months ago.  I have never blogged before, so it’s all new to me.  In the spirit of giving back to the community and paying homage to those who have helped me; I chose to write a summary of things and thoughts that have helped me to date.  So, here are the greatest hits so far:

First, I had to choose something to blog about.  I wanted to blog on progressive issues with a critical eye, paying special attention to calls for accountability in public and private institutions.  There are two blog paths: a)free blog sites that have their own very simple & limited software or b) paid hosting with whatever software I choose.  I chose the latter because I am a control freak and I want absolute control over my content, my site admin and my site design.  Even if you are in the former categor, there should be some useful info here for you, too.

 I chose Mojohost as my webhosting company, run by Brad Mitchell.  They set me up instantly.  I got my domain name and my ftp server login right away.  I didn’t know what kind of software to use for my blog and one of the Mojohost techs was very helpful.  He explained them all in terms what was important to me.  I chose WordPress because it was OSS and extremely configurable.  I like OSS a lot.  It is generally very secure because so many people have access to the code and are therefore able to test it.  Cost is also a factor for me, as I do not have deep pockets. 

I began with WordPress v. 2.6.3 and have upgraded it several times.  I’m currently using 2.7 rc1.  I used Filezilla for my ftp operations.  For anyone new to ftp, it is no different than moving files around on your own computer.  There is one exception and that is that on ftp, the file system permissions of files and directories is much more important than on your own computer.

My strategy was to spend my first couple of weeks looking around the Internet & blogosphere for ideas to steal.  I wanted to have the look of the blog down before too long.  So, I put up the site and over a week or two, I messed around with enough site themes, perfomance plugins, etc. to begin writing.  My primary goal overall was to avoid simple mistakes – continuity, spelling, common requested items. 

Then, I reached out to network.  I found a bloggers’ meet-up here in Chicago.  I went to that meeting and invited Kirsten Miller, Web Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. I attended a seminar on blogging, run by Barb Iverson and Keidra Chaney.  This was also helpful.  I got the chance to mingle with other bloggers, but to get strategy and configuration questions answered with my laptop opened to the admin portal of my blog.

Every day, I looked around the web for blogging tips.  I began to find tools that can help.  Firebug, a plugin for Firefox is extremely helpful.  It allows me to look at any website, especially my own – to see what is working and what is not and on what CSS sheet the code resides.

I joined social networking sites!  Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg and more.  I use plugins in WP to help me direct and report traffic to my site.  People started visiting my site.  One person, another blogger named Hannah Kelly was extremely gracious and turned me on to several sites to help me get exposure.  One site, Allvoices.com is very intriguing.  It’s an internet reporting portal.  I joined it this week.  They are like a cross between Twitter the AP.  They actually pay reporters good money for original work.  Check them out and see for yourself, if you have any desires of being a new media reporter.

So, my basic mantra through all of this is experiment, control and ejnoy.  Right now, I’m in no danger of running out of things to fill any of these buckets. 

-gadfly