let me lead you

So a couple of you had mentioned to me in the past week that you will be setting up a blog, or were thinking of it, so I thought I'd share some things that were helpful for me. Obvs, I'm no programmer or hacker or whatever you kids call it these days, but I'll try my best.

Obviously, I am partial to blogger. It's free, you can create multiple blogs, and it is easy to manipulate the html code to make it look however you want. If you know html code that is. If you are completely clueless, it is still easy to use and will set everything up for you, including a title and description and stuff. Xanga is good, and Typepad is good too, but I think you have to pay. If you use a myspace blog or livejournal, we will no longer be friends.

As far as pictures go, I know blogger allows you to upload stuff, but I prefer to use free image hosting services. THe one I use, imagshack, always resizes the picture to fit, and if you click on it, it will come up in another window in another size. Similar to this is tinypic and supload. You can either upload a picture from your computer or put in the url of a picture and it will transfer it.

I love to use blogrolling for all my links on the right side of the blog. THis is good if you have a lot of links you want to put up. It will give you one piece of code to put on your blog, and then you can manage the actual links from your account on the site. I actually use this because these are all sites I visit regularly and I can just come to my own blog instead of putting it in my favorites.

I use Sitemeter to track how how many people and who visits my site. THere are more detailed ones out there, but Sitemeter is free and easy to manage. Again, it generates a small piece of code to put on your blog and you can manage stuff from your account.

To upload music, that gets a little more complicated. I take the album and compress it using WinRar or Winzip, and then use a filehosting service. All of these have their pros and cons, but I won't get into that now. Mostly I use yousendit, Easy Share, Turbo Upload, Quick Dump.

Here are my DOs and DONTs of blogging.

1. Please update regularly. THe point of a blog to to update it frequently. Or else you can have a fucking Geocities site. If you think what you will post is uninteresting. You are wrong. Blogs were created on the very notion that people need to share the mundane aspects of their life to validate themselves. What, you think your life is so important and busy you don't have time to post? Please.

2. For pete's sake, don't start a pop culture blog. This is overdone and unecessary. Of course, mention pop culture stuff that is of interest to you, but no need to blog about Nick and Jessica or shit like that.

3. When linking to somewhere, please make sure it pops up in another browser. This is just etiquette. If it just goes to that site, I will forget about your site and probably find it a pain to keep hitting the back button. You can do this by inserting target="_blank" into the code. Just before the > in url.

4. Don't get fired from your job because of a blog you have. That is plain stupid. Try to keep your blog anonymous by not explicitly mentioning your name so when someone googles you, they won't find your blog.

I feel like these are the Fight Club rules of blogging. I hoped this helped, at least a lil bit.