Setting up blog

[smiley]

        Hi Everyone!

I have a question about blogs. Is there a very simple way to set up a blog? Is it possible to have the current blog on a homepage and then it'll link to a blog page? If you know of any simple solutions, I would appreciate it.

Need some advice.

Thanks        

[tacit]

What exactly do you want to do?

There are three ways to set up a blog. The first way takes about fifteen or twenty seconds and requires about a dozen key presses on your keyboard; the second way takes a bit longer and is more work; the third way requires extensive programming and configuring. Which way is right for you depends on what you want to do.

The first way to create a blog is to go to a blogging site like www.livejournal.com and set up a free account. It is quick and easy; you pick a name, pick a password, and that's it, you're done. You use a special URL to see your blog--for example, you can read my blog by going to http://tacit.livejournal.com if you want--and you use a Web browser to update your blog and to read other blogs.

The second way makes it look like the blog is hosted on your own site. if you already have a Web site, your visitors can go to a page on your Web site and see your blog. This is called "embedding." The blog is still at LiveJournal, but you use special HTML codes to "embed" the blog inside your own page. (Basically, it loads your blog into a frame on the page.) In order to do this with most blogging sites, you need to be a paid member; free members are not allowed to embed their blogs.

The third way actually puts your blog on oyur Web page for real. You can either write your own blogging software in a language like PHP or ASP, or you can download an open-source computer program such as WordPress, written in PHP, and install it on your server. Doing this requires at least a little bit of knowledge about how to install and configure PHP scripts, how to set up a MySQL database, and how to interface the PHP program with the database. It also requires that your Web server has PHP and MySQL on it, and that you know how to configure your Web server software correctly. When you're done, the blog actually lives on your Web site. Of course, that also makes you responsible for maintaining the software and doing security updates; running PHP does open up the possibility that hackers can get in and take over your Web site, and you need to keep on top of security issues, updates to whatever blogging software you are using, and so on.

[Gregg]

Marcel: quick! Make the following post:

I think what you want to do is what Tacit called "embedding". It sounds like that's the way to have a link to your blog on your home page. Just follow the steps on the blogging site.

P.S. Don't tell smiley that you had help!

[smiley]

Tacit, thank you for the detailed choices

What I want to do is to have the current blog on the homepage. Have a link in the vicinity of that blog and then allow viewers to click on the link to a page with blogs and comments. I would like to get the page with blogs to look like the rest of the pages. Is that difficult to do?

[tacit]

QUOTE(smiley @ Jan 31 2007, 03:10 PM) [snapback]117530[/snapback]

Tacit, thank you for the detailed choices

What I want to do is to have the current blog on the homepage. Have a link in the vicinity of that blog and then allow viewers to click on the link to a page with blogs and comments. I would like to get the page with blogs to look like the rest of the pages. Is that difficult to do?

Embedding will do that. Many, but not all, Weblog services offer some way to embed a blog into an existing home page.

The Weblog I use, LiveJournal, allows you to embed. If you get a free LiveJournal account, you can embed your LiveJournal into your existing Web site, but you do not have full control over the way the blog looks; you can choose from a couple of dozen pre-built templates for the look and feel of the blog, but you can not completely customize it. For what you want to do, this will probably be fine.

If you want complete, 100% control over the appearance of the embedded blog, using CSS stylesheets, then you need to have a paid LiveJournal acccount. This will not only let you embed the blog in your existing page, but will also give you total, unrestricted ability to customize precisely how the embedded blog looks.

You can sign up for a free account with LiveJournal here. The quick FAQ about how to embed a LiveJournal blog on your existing page is here. A step-by-step guided tutorial that shows exactly how to embed your journal is here.

There are several different methods you can use to embed your journal. The simplest is using HTML frames; the next simplest is using JavaScript (but it won't work if your visitors have JavaScript turned off in their browser for some reason). You can also embed it using a programming language like PHP, Perl, Python, or ASP, though I don't recommend doing this if you're not a Web programmer.