Best way to make a blog?

Hiya, I'm gonna start a blog, or possibly two. Oh no, you cry. Well one will be game and development related and thus hopefully interesting plus it will also present several marketing opportunities. And the other, wait for it, will be about heath and personal development. Yes I know Steve Pavlina already has one, but my partner Helen, who writes for science magasines, will be helping me and thus it should be informative and different.

Anyway I wanted a nice clean look to it and the ability for people to comment etc and I wondered the best way to go bout it. I could wiki or google but I wanted to hear it from the bloggers mouth, so to speak.

Should I use someone else's well known engine, do I ahve to pay etc, or shall I make my own? What are the pitfalls to look out for. What are the cool things I should do etc.

thanks in advance for any advice.

Oh No!

http://www.blogger.com/ (owned by google)

What sort of things come under the heading of "personal development"? Just sounds a bit new-agey.

I've used WordPress http://wordpress.org/ and find it quite nice. You can customize the way it looks, or download any of several hundred skins people have made. Supports comments, spam filtering and more. It uses MySQL and PHP. If your webhosting service supports that it shouldn't be too hard to set up.

Ragnar

If you have a good webhost they might well have these things set up for you already. My host, PowWeb, has a whole bunch of stuff like this available from their control panel. You simply pick which shopping cart system, blogging system, content management system, forum system, etc you want, click a button and it installs it for you. Wordpress is among those. So it's worth looking or asking.

Same as Gabriel. Works fine for me.

Wordpress is easy to setup, and seems to work good.

big10p: well it'll start with self-management/organisation techniques that have helped me so far and then might get a bit more new-agey :-) Also there'll be lots of info about healthy living and household chemicals (the bad kind :-)) etc.

OK so it's google or wordpress if my ISP doesn't already have one, I'll go check.

Speaking of making blogs, I just finished the new design on mine. No more using themes made by someone other than me.

where is your blog then?

If you have signatures enabled, then you should be able to just click that image that says "noel."

ok seen it. By the ways, Some Notes is out of line on your right hand menu.

Strangely enough I only just set my "thephorse" blog up yesterday using the blogger site from google. Its mega easy and fun :D

I've just made one in Wordpress. Not much on it yet and thus haven't linked it to my main site. I can't put my own image on the header which is a bummer. I read yours, hey good for you you got some more downloads and a sales, probably this is due to the increased traffic my gmae is bringing to Cloverleaf ;-)

Become japanese, grow long hair, start wearing glasses and change your name to Hideo Kojima. That's how. :)




(Reference to hideo blog case that made no sense)

DD: well I have long hair, wear glasses and teach a Japanese martial art, and play some Japanese games (inc. MGS) so I'm >50% there :-)

GA, I think it probably is! I appreciate it :P I'll bet you're doing well with it close to easter now!

Im getting a fair bit more traffic on my site too all of a sudden...dont know where its come from :o

Thanks for the link exchange again btw ;)

you could make a blog... they aren't hard to make... if all you want is a list of blog entrees the blog entrees themselves with all the comments under the blog entree... something like how my www.dampes8n.com/timebridge/ site does the installments. list of installments, click the links and you get the installment and the comments under that, and the addition form under that.