Episode: 1667
Title: HPR1667: How to start a Blog
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1667/hpr1667.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:39:07

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Its Tuesday 23rd of December 2014, this is HPR Episode 1667 entitled How To Start A Blog.
It is hosted by First Time Host Reel and is about 13 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to JFA at lijafa.net or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, How To Start A Blog and Why You Might Want To.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hey, this is Reel.
I am recording my first hacker public radio podcast, although I have done many podcasts
in the past.
My topic today is How To Start A Blog, which was one of the suggested topics.
I'm not quite sure what the person who suggested this project had in mind, but here's what
I'm going to do with it.
I am going to assume that the hacker public radio public basically can figure out how
to go online and use one of the blogger style services, such as blogger, live journal,
or WordPress.
I am also going to assume, I hope correctly, that anyone listening to this podcast would
be able to install WordPress or another type of blogging feature on their website.
I know Drupal has an option for a blog, and Nicola has been covered previously on
hacker public radio.
So getting all the mechanics out of the way of actually having a place to blog, what
about a blog, what sort of things might you want to think about?
The first for some people might be what does it look like?
And so you would spend some time thinking about templates, color, how you want things organized,
what sort of side bars you might want, what there might be in them, and so forth and
so on.
As a blind person, I basically stick with text and try to make the blog as simple as possible.
This might not be visually attractive, but I find it works for me because the page is
very simple.
The most important thing, though, is what I want to talk about today, and this is perhaps
philosophical in nature, which is why do you want to blog in the first place?
What's your goal here?
What do you want to do with this idea of blogging?
If you've spent any time at all on the internet, which I again assume we all have, we gain
lots of information from blogs.
We put in a search term, we find there's an answer, we look up the page, and the answer
is a post.
Someone has written to describe how they have done one thing or another.
And if we look at that page a little bit, we can find out that there are recent posts
or look at the last post or see that the blog item has been categorized.
And we can see other information, other how-to posts.
That's one way to set up a blog, the share what I know blog.
Other blogs can be pictorial in nature.
They could be specific to a particular activity you do.
You might have a fish blog where you talk about eating fish, talk about repairing fish,
talk about catching fish, talk about raising fish.
Things to do with fish, fish, tackle, bait, rods, reels, casting, and so forth, how
to fish.
They could be about your life.
They could be a specific part of your life.
Here's a blog about the vacation I took.
We went skiing and I will tell you about our ski trip to Utah and where we stayed, what
we ate, what shops we visited, and what we thought of the place where we skied, where
they can be generally about your life.
Were you post randomly about things you think about, things you do.
The topic of your blog isn't the only thing to think about why you want to start a blog.
It may be what you expect to accomplish from starting a blog and maintaining a blog.
Are you intending to keep this as, more or less, your own record?
It's public, other people can look at it, but you're not really interested in page views.
You're not trying to leverage anything from this.
It's for your own pleasure and satisfaction.
It may simply be a way to keep your own notes on projects, post your own photos about
a trip, make some comments, and have it available to look back on and to share with some friends.
I once heard a statistic and it was about live journal, I think, and it could have been
a decade ago, that said most blogs are seen by six people.
And of those six people, most of them were relatives or close friends.
The internet as a whole did not read most blogs.
However, some people use their blogs to get to be known for something.
They're the go-to blog for one specific thing or another, and that might help the person
get some deals, get advertising, get a job, get noticed, get to be the expert in the
field.
That means that you're not just starting a blog.
You want to start more than a blog.
You want to promote your blog and your work.
And that means you're spiraling into social media, being a guest blogger on other people's
sites, basically putting yourself out there to be known.
So why is it that I blog?
I've been blogging on and off for, oh, maybe not quite as long as a decade, but getting
there.
I blog because I like to write, and I like to think that somebody might stumble across
my blog and say, oh, what an interesting idea that person had.
I like to post my writing, basically to toss it out to the universe, and if someone enjoys
reading, great, if they don't, fine.
I'm not there to start a conversation.
I'm not there to really impress people.
It's just I'd like to share.
And so that's why I blog.
I've done other blogs.
I do one for Raspberry Vi, where I talk about some of my Raspberry Pi experiences.
And mostly, I try to document what I've done, so that if I need to look it up again,
I can do that.
I think I probably use my blog more than anybody else, just for that reason.
It's my story, and I enjoy telling stories, so this is my Raspberry Pi story.
I blog when I feel like it, when I have something to say, when I have something to share.
Another way of blogging is to assign yourself a schedule, which is to say, I blog on Wednesdays,
or I blog three times a day, or I blog twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays.
Some people find that helps them, and it helps their readers know when there will be
new content.
As I said, I blog when I feel like it, because this blog is something I enjoy putting together,
and so when I don't want to make it a job, I want to blog when I feel like it, and when
I don't feel like it, I don't blog.
Again, it depends on why you are blogging, and what you hope to accomplish when you blog.
Well, I think I've run out of ideas for what I want to say about blogging at this point,
if there's something else I can cover that somebody wants to know, and I might know the
answer to, let me know, and I'll see what I can do.
Thanks for listening.
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