Setting up a food blog

After seeing some of the interesting/informative blogs of posters on this forum, I've been inspired to try to create my own site to document my and my family's eating adventures.

I guess I'd consider myself pretty web savvy (after all, I help maintain a Web site as part of my job!), but I'm not sure where to start in terms of creating my own internet space. A friend recommended www.blogspot.com, but I'd like to find a site that will let me post more photos.

Any suggestions?

I'll try to answer this quickly now, and I can add details later if needed.

There are two issues when setting up a blog (or any web site), the issue of "host" or domain and the issue of platform or how do you compose your blog. Also, I s'pose there is the issue of price. How much do you want to pay.

You can, like me, do a blog for free. Blogger, which is the link you cited above, will give you enough space on the Internet if you are willing to use a domain that has .blogspot in it and also has their ads on your page. If you want your own custom domain name or no ads, you must pay something. Movable Type, the primary competetor to Blogger also offers domains, but I am pretty sure they do not offer a free domain. So, figure out your domain situation first. If you have a domain name or even a web site already, you can direct your blog to "feed" into that site.

As to platforms, there are two main ones, as I said, Blogger and Movable Type. Most people that I know think Movable Type is better, but there is the question of cost and ease of setting up. There are other platforms out there of course.

I use Blogger and it is very, very easy to compose posts. It looks similar to LTH, but I think even easier. (Well, somethings inserting links are easier, inserting images are harder). It takes no special skill to "blog".

The other thing is how you want you blog or page to look. Blogger and others give you templates to work from. My blog is essentially a standard template. Futzing with your template is about area where you may need some HTML knowledge. I've relied on a friend to do a few things, but I have not paid much attention to making my blog look better. If I did, it would take more HTML.

If you want comments on your blog, you can chose from various packages out there. I use Haloscan, which I think is the most popular. Again, there are free versions and paid versions. Getting the comments on your blog is not a hard thing at all. You essentially place one line of script in the body of your blog and whammo, you have comments too.

Rob

Decide first if you want to do it for free or if you want to spend some money.

If you want to do it for free, you have to deal with a hosted service and Blogger is currently the only free one.

MovableType is a free software package that you install on a server or have a hosting service provide (which will cost). There are a ton of other platforms like MT, but MT is the market leader.

The company that created MT also created TypePad, a hosted service that does not have any free packages.

If you want to go with Blogger, you can find another free service to host photos for you and include them in your blog entries as fully-qualified <IMG> tags. Let me know if you need more info on how to do that.

For reference, here's what I do: I have a hosting provider where I have a package that hosts multiple domains for me (I pay for this service). I was able to download and install MT for free and customize it to my needs. This didn't really cost me anything because I already had the domain package. The traffic to EatChicago.net is about 10x higher than I ever thought it would be and if it continues to go up, I'll have to pay more.

Also, I am a software engineer, so installing and customizing software on a server is not a problem for me.

Thanks to both of you for your help.

I have to admit some of it was a little technical for me, but I think I get the basic idea.

I guess ideally I'm looking for a free service. I didn't realize I'd have to use separate software or services if I wanted to post photos. I think I'll need some help figuring that part out.

Also, I work for Northwestern and just realized they offer some personal web space for people affiliated with the school. So I guess if I set up a home page through this, I can "feed" the blogger onto this site? I'm not exactly sure what that means or what it does for me, though. Does this mean I could use MT with the NU provided server?

Janet C. wrote:Thanks to both of you for your help.

I have to admit some of it was a little technical for me, but I think I get the basic idea.

I guess ideally I'm looking for a free service. I didn't realize I'd have to use separate software or services if I wanted to post photos. I think I'll need some help figuring that part out.

Also, I work for Northwestern and just realized they offer some personal web space for people affiliated with the school. So I guess if I set up a home page through this, I can "feed" the blogger onto this site? I'm not exactly sure what that means or what it does for me, though. Does this mean I could use MT with the NU provided server?

As to the picture thing, I am almost positive that Blogger has a service for hosting images. The key thing, just like putting pics on LTH, is that pics have to be stored on a computer otherwise connected to the Internet. You cannot put an pic from your computer's hard drive (i.e., your "C Drive") onto a blog.

It is not hard to "feed" your blog into another site. When you go thru the set up process, which I felt was pretty user friendly, you are asked about those issues. You would just put in the domain name where it asks. It will make sense as you do the process.

On Blogger, you first have to set up an account. It's a bunch of questions. Then from the Blogger navigation page you can set up a blog. You can have more than one blog if you want. Then, you pick a name. Blogger will make sure there are no other blogs with that name. If you want to use the Blogspot.com hosting, you will also pick a domain. The name of my blog is Vital Information. The name of my domain is vitalinformation.blogspot.com. They do not necessarily have to match. A lot of the political blogs have names that are not the same as their domaion.

On Blogger, after you do all that, you will be given a bunch of templates to choose. If you were so inclined, you could just make your own--if you were an ace programmer!

Like I say, it follows a "wizard" like system, and it is not very hard at all.

Rob

This may be the most retro advice you will get, but I suggest you use the free webspace your employer provides (most people are entitled to free hosting from their internet provider and don't even know it), forget about all the tools and learn a little HTML.

You don't have to know it all or even very much to author a web page, with pictures. http://www.w3schools.com/ is a good place to start. A blog is just a series of short essays strung together in chronological order, with the last one first. The web was practically invented for that, so you won't need to know much more than basic HTML.

Tools are fine but my theory is that you always have more control when you actually know what you are doing. This is what I do and I'm no way a tech guy. I'm just a writer, pretty much a tech dunce actually, and it works for me.