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Creating a Blog For Family and Friends

One of the easiest methods to set up your own web site is to get your own blog at one of the free blog sites. You might want to share some photos with family and friends. You might want to write about hobbies, business, computers, dogs, politics or any other subject. A blog is a great tool for these purposes.

A couple of the large, free blog sites are Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, and WordPress.com, which is the from the people who make WordPress blog software available for anyone to use.

WordPress is the most common blogging software, and is the one I use on most of my sites. The software is free to download ( from www.WordPress.org ) and to use on your own web hosting account, or you can get a free account at www.WordPress.com

The free account allows you to authorize individual user iD's to author and/or comment on blog entries. I believe you also have control of whether the blog is open to be read by the public or only by specified users.

Of course, anything that you do that limits functions to specific users will require those individuals to set up their own WordPress.com account. Once they have their own account, they can also create their own blogs.

WordPress.com has a few specific themes that you can use. They also have a "upgrade fee" that I think is only about $15 or so, which will allow you to customize your blog much more extensively.

By the way, be sure to sign up for the free Akismet anti-spam plugin — it does a good job of filtering the spam comments. You'll get an email notice when someone comments on your blog. If the Akismet filter is triggered, you'll get a message from it, allowing you to review the comment while it is in quarantine.

My blogs:

• My Terry's Computer Tips blog
• My Computer for Christmas blog focuses on the issues of new computer owners and owners-to-be, including buying tips and security tips.
• PC Repair Site .Info focuses on preventing security problems with PC's and solving them when they occur.
• My Vista Repair Site looks at Windows Vista, its Operability and its Security
• XP Repair Site focuses on problem prevention and resolution on Windows XP computers;
• Drawing on the Web, my web design blog, focuses on creating web sites, finding web hosts, getting traffic, search engine optimization (SEO), links and more; and
• WebDrawing is another of my web design blogs, this time at WordPress.com

My blogs are hosted in my web hosting accounts at Hostgator and Powweb.

Copyright © 2007-2008 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.