If you’re reading this you’re probably a fellow student at Birmingham City University’s graduate class in social media. You might also have ended up here by chance, perhaps through a news feed or a search engine. Despite your origin, you’ve landed on Space: Above and Beyond, a blog I use to shoot bits and pieces of this and that into cyberspace. This piece is a reflection over my blogging endeavours and will hopefully end with some sort of advice.
When I first created a blog a couple of years ago, I used Blogger. It’s a great platform which integrates with Google Accounts, ranks high in search results and features a simple drag-and-drop makeup kit. Today, however, my blog runs WordPress on a web server provided by Loopia. I registered the domain, griberg.com (my surname), and chipped in for a hosting service because I wanted a custom URL and email (@domain.com). The blog is dressed in a slightly modified version of the free Coraline theme. Here’s a screengrab of how it renders in Google Chrome (17.0.963.56) running on Max OS X (10.6.8):
As you can see, the left-hand side is a chronological stream of blog posts. The right-hand side is a set of links to my social accounts, stuff I like, and more. To keep the blog light and clean, I decided to leave out categories, tags, unnecessary sub-pages, navigation bars, etc.
Setting up WordPress on a server can be a bit tricky and might require some technical skills and a FTP client. Once up and running, however, it works like a charm. Writing a blog post is as simple as writing a Word document. You can switch between visual and HTML editors. The latter allows you to fine-tune how text and images appear in your post. This screengrab gives you an idea of what the back-end looks like (mind the Swedish):
When I publish something new, I usually give it a push via Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ and Twitter. The number of visitors to the blog, however, remains low. It appears that people rather stay on their favorite platform to read updates from family and friends. As I don’t seek fame or fortune, this doesn’t bother me. The blog in it’s current shape is nothing but a record of goodies and food for thought.
Though I’ll never replace my beloved WordPress, I’ve recently stumbled upon another blogging platform, Posterous, which has some interesting features I hope WordPress will take on. While using the platform during the last semester’s course Social Media as Culture, I found its option to post by email particularly useful. Worth mentioning is also the Posterous mobile app, which I used extensively to read and comment (compare to the WordPress app which is quite clunky). Here’s a screengrab of what it looks like on my iPhone (iOS 5.0.1):
If you’re thinking of throwing yourself into the blogosphere, my advice would be a dedicated server and WordPress. Though, if you’re on a shoestring budget and worried about hacking a bit of HTML and CSS, I’d probably give Blogger a go. Posterous would be a good option if you plan to blog on the go.
Last, but not least, let’s add Tumblr to this train of thought. Tumblr has been around for a while, but has recently gained speed. I never used the platform, but signed up last night (for the purpose of this post). At a first glance it’s pure genius. While giving the impression of being a micro-blog, it’s so much more. Here’s a screengrab of what it looks like on the back-end:
I can essentially post anything I want, and the interface is dead simple. If I hit audio, for example, I’m taken to a page where I can either upload a MP3 or insert an embed code from an external hosting service. Like in WordPress, Blogger and Posterous, I’ll add a title, a caption and a set of tags, but what makes Tumblr a potential killer is it’s feature to schedule posts. I’ve seen this on 3rd party apps like TweetDeck, but never as a default option on a blogging platform.
Anyways, I stop here and pass on the mike. If you’ve any experience using Tumblr I’d love to hear what you’ve to say. I’d be particularly interested in hearing how it has been used by the public sector and how its mobile app compares to other.
Blog long and prosper, over and out!
