Chapter 3/ Create Your Own Photo Blog
It’s time to start writing again. I have had a fun time pushing up photos and letting the other side of what’s left of this brain have a rest. But it can’t go on forever. Besides, we have only arrived at chapter 3 in Catherine Jamieson’s wonderful book about photo blogging. And there can be precious little time for Ruminations or Daily Blog Reports until we finish here. I’m trying to be a disciplined person so please bear with me. Practicing retirement every day means maintaining a low level of discipline. But not none at all!
The goal of Chapter 3 is to equip you with a photo blog by the end. You will need a domain, a web hosting company and a design template. Did you know that I have a domain? It is davidnotes.com and I put most everything here in it. Why? I don’t know. We don’t have time today to discuss it.
Following this is information about using a content management system. Because who wants to manage their own stuff? There are not enough hours in the day. We have an example of a blog that uses the MT content-management system. Let’s see if it’s there…. www.bradknapp.com is moving along just fine. I really like the idea of clicking on a thumbnail and a large picture magically appears. He does lots of portraits and my blog does very few. So I can learn a lot about them here.
Ms. Jamieson now decides to use the Movable Type platform for teaching purposes. Is that a problem for us? I don’t know. She quickly moves on to a the issue of storing photos and strongely recommends online storage. Flickr and Photobucket are mentioned. Putting photos there can boost viewership and gain feedback. She recommends Nexcess for a hosting company and stresses the need for dependability. I had this issue come up yesterday and my hosting company, HostiCan, helped me with the geek issue in about fifteen minutes. She mentions Wordpress and My Expressions but says Movable Type is the best supported and most often used content-management system. I realize that is different from having your own domain and web hosting company. You can have either. Or both like me. Or neither if you decide to take up racquetball.
Her final recommendations are to A: Use a content-management system. B: Store most of your photos on Flickr. C: Store the rest of your blog on your own domain.
My recommendation, if i may be so audacious as to give one based on my novice status, is to do both A and C equally and at the same time. For awhile you can simply export one into the other and save precious files at the same time (It would be great if Wordpress would increase the limit on the file size. How are you supposed to restore your blog if you lose it and it’s bigger than 3m?). But mainly I find that the community aspect of Wordpress.com is invaluable. You will get much more encouragement and assistance as you start building a blog. So I wouldn’t do more with Wordpress.org at first. In fact, I would do less if you don’t have time to do both fully.
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