Blogging on Freewebs

Or I should call it webs now.

www.freewebs.com was a site I used to use for file storage. I never actually cared that you could actually create a website there and didn’t use that functionality. This year I started using it and they have also been improving it. Now you can get a pretty full featured website up pretty quickly.

I figured I’d put up some tutorials at using some of the features. One because I’m always looking for something to blog about lately and two because I think these tutorials will help someone out.

The first tutorial is blogging and the first step is to log into freewebs by typing your username and password in the boxes provided.

You will be presented with the dashboard for your account.

Move your mouse over Edit My Site and a drop down menu will appear. Select Site Manager from the drop down menu.

Since we are blogging select Blog from the list of pages.

And you will be presented with the Site Builder for you Blog. Select Post New Entry.

Enter a Title and use the rich text box to enter the body for your blog entry. You have a lot of formatting control over the rich text box and you can add images or embed video.

Select the Publish button when you are finished.

And you’ll have your first blog entry on Freewebs. Here is a link to the actual blog entry. Next up: Calendars

WARNING: Webs.com has been freezing sites for very little reason and often don’t respond to inquires about the freeze.  Just letting you know.

Blidgets

Not only can you find interesting widgets at WidgetBox, but you can also create your own.

Click this link to Make a Widget. You will be presented with the following screen.

Choose Blog/Feed and you will be prompted for your blog feed url.

Enter your feed url and continue and it attempts to generate your blidget but I don’t think it will be exactly what you want, you’ll need to customize it.

Customize the blidget. By choosing the Appearance – I went for the leopard skin.

And the content – I went for the slide show.

And finally the cataloguing details. People can search for your finished widget – if you want them to.

Once you save the widget, you will get the widget screen. This is the screen that anyone who wants your widget will see. You can further customize your widget here and then “Get Widget”

And you will be given a little box that has the javascript you need to publish your widget on any page.

My javascript looks like this.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.widgetserver.com/syndication/subscriber/InsertWidget.js"></script>

<script>if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('6468a97f-3334-484d-923f-7bbc75305463');</script>

<noscript></noscript>

Once you have the Javascript, just place it wherever you can place html. I use one in my forum signatures.

Blogging

I've only been blogging for a short period of time so I have a limited perspective on it. But I thought I would share with you what I have learned so far about weblogs.

First you've got to decide where you are going to blog. To me, this was the most critical decision. There are plenty of places to blog out there: Blogger, Word Press, Windows Live, and Freewebs - to name a few. There is even an adult one called Thumblogger.

Plus there are a couple of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Plurk, or Jaiku. They're fine if you are wanting to communicate and you don't have lots to say, but we are talking about longer blogs here.

In doing a page oriented blog, it is important that you have some log writing software. Many people use Word Press - I think this is mostly the Mac contingent. I use Windows Live Writer. It came with Windows Live, it was free and it seems full featured. Again, like your blogging host, there are a number of different programs to choose from and most of them are free.

If you don't have Blog software, you can use the online page that most blog hosts have for your blog. This is usually clunky to use and allows a serious error to occur. One time while using one of these pages, I wrote my whole entry and wanted to search for some additional information. I navigated away from the page and lost everything I had written.

Blog software, like Live Writer, makes publishing your blog easy. Besides doing WSYWYG markup, they allow you to upload the content and some even allow you to upload pictures. And not just to host sites associated with the software - anywhere.

Well almost anywhere, your host site needs to support one of the many protocols available to your blogging software. Freewebs didn't, that is why I stopped blogging there. That and it seemed to have a problem with some external images.

I was going to use Windows Live as my blogging site. But you only seem to get one blog per Windows Live account. So after looking around a bit, I choose blogger. Mostly because they were there, they specialise in blogs and I liked the look of their templates. I don't want to be spending a huge amount of time customising the site, I just want to write words.

A lot of people chose Word Press. Again, I think this is because they are Mac users but there probably are other reasons.

The last thing you need with a blog is decide on you content. I'm a pretty eclectic person so I wanted to write about everything. But I'm learning quickly that you can't do that. People have to take an interest in the subject matter of your blog in order for it to get read. This is what we are trying to achieve, isn't it? To have our blog read.

So pick a subject and stick to it - or do like I did and start a number of blogs, one for each subject you like to blog about. Before you know it you'll have more posts than you expect.