This one is the first blogger sites I set up and it’s all about amazing educational finds online.. from sites to free offers. I teach tech, so we use a lot of these resources and I never cease to be amazed at the plethora of wonderful free educational tools and services available on the wide world web. I found this wonderful blogger theme (see January’s “Best Blogger Themes and How-to“) and thought it perfect for the type of blog I wanted to do. I have many categories that help to organize the various posts.. from assorted grades, subjects to homeschooling and freebies. I also occasionally share a lesson or two that I’ve personally taught in class and saw great results with. Check out great-edu-sites.blogspot.coms

So, this is a newer one I call “Enter to win!” I like sweepstakes and enter to win contests. I mostly like to win, but you can’t win if you don’t enter. I find it handy to have a place to go for a fresh supply of contest sites to enter. There are many out there, but sometimes you have to become a member and log in for access or sift through miles of content to find the actual sweeps. I wanted to put something together that was easy to find and do, quickly, without any other gobblygook to slow things down. So, I found this blogger theme that was perfect for the type of entry listing format I had in mind. All the newer contest go directly to the top and basically everything new displays right there on the front page. No need to search. I can’t cover ALL the contests out there, but I do try to post some quality ones along with some personal favorites. Check out nter2win.blogspot.com

Blogger is the perfect platform for the beginner. As you can see, it’s still fun for the not-so-beginners too. Blogger sites are easy to set up. You can have your site and content ideas up and online in 15 minutes and there are tons of themes to choose from too. I have a total of 6 blogger blogs. You can see the list of them on my blogger profile. Two were featured above and below are thumbnails of a few more, but they offer less content or simply pull the rss feed from one of my larger domains. But maybe you’d like to take a look at them anyways.

Thanks for reading and checking them out. I love feedback, so feel free to let me know what you think. Blogger.com is the free blogging service referred to here and what I used to create these simple blog style sites. Haven’t started blogging yet? Why not give it a try?

Photography

I’ve started a photo blog. Photography has been a hobby of mine for many years.. I’ve always shared photos with family and friends in some way, whether it be within a social network, a blog post or flickr, but this is the first site I’ve created specifically for my favorite photos.

I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think.
http://photogkarlyn.com/

Register Here.

Some of the topics you may be interested in:
• Not sure how/where to begin your blogging experience
• You’re not sure what to “blog” about
• You want to learn how to attract more readers
• Need help with “technical” aspects
• Interested in how to make money from blogging

Share your cell phone photos!

I like taking random, spontaneous photos with my camera phone and then sharing them with my friends, don’t you? If you answered “Yes!”, then you will probably enjoy Snapfoo.

This a fun, free photo blog for you to post your photos and short text description. Your friends can view your new photos and if you happen to twitter too, then your snapfoo posts can display to your twitter also (optional).

I only have a few invites left though. So let me know by leaving a comment here if you know you want to start using snapfoo today!

To answer this question, let’s first look at how a blog is created. Just like creating web pages, first, you need a software or script that will take your entries, format it and publish it to the web. The second component of a blog, is the web space, where the software should publish to, a home for the blog pages.

Knowing this information, let’s review the different ways to host a blog:

Full Blog Host
This is where the blogging system or software is provided for you and your blog is also published to a web space provided by the host. Blogger, SquareSpace and Typepad fall into this category. It’s very much like creating a website with a site builder.

Hosted Blog Software But Published Elsewhere
This is where the blog software is provided for you but the blog pages are published to another website or web host altogether. By doing this, the software acts as a publishing system like FrontPage except it creates nicely formatted blogs. Blogger is probably the most well known for this. Yes Blogger can do both. Publish to their host or to yours. As a comparison, this is like using FrontPage to publish your website.

Blog Software And Blog Are Hosted On Your Web Server
This is where you would install the blog script (software) on your web server – it can be any web hosting account. And when you publish, the blog itself resides on your web server also. To draw a parallel, this technique is like buying web hosting and then installing a content management system on it to help you build web pages.

If you’re new to building web pages or have built sites using site builders then you might want to go with a fully hosted blog. These hosts do all the nitty gritty for you and there’s very little technical stuff you need to know. If you can point and click, you can build a blog with a full blog host.

Having said that, just because you’re seasoned at building web pages doesn’t mean full blog hosts won’t work for you. In fact, if you have many blogs this becomes very appealing since you won’t have to worry about upgrading the blog script, people exploiting the script, making plug-ins work or what happens when your web host decides to disable part of your blog functions because there is a security hole. All you do is concentrate on blogging. After a while, blogging becomes more important than maintaining your blog and that’s the way it should be.

Next up, hosted software but blog is published to your website. This seems to be the best of both worlds. At time of writing, Blogger is one of the best ways to do this but because of its popularity often, you find the system too slow to publish or completely down just when you have a hot idea to share. The idea is good but you’ll also be depending on someone else’s availability to publish your blog. It’s much like using a friend’s computer to build your web pages and you know how that can go.

Finally, you have the option to use scripts. This is also a very popular method. The flexibility it allows is very liberating because you can mould the blog anyway you want. You can even get a programmer to create custom plug-ins or customize the whole blogging system the way you want it. In short, you can do pretty much anything you want.

The down side, you need at the very basic, some knowledge of HTML or publishing web pages. Also the burden of upgrading, troubleshooting and maintaining the script is on you. If you have one or two blogs it’s not so bad but once you start having more, it can be quite tedious. You also have to consider all the other responsibilities of maintaining the script as mentioned earlier.

Armed with this information, you should be able to figure out which one is for you. If you’re still undecided, think of how you would do it if you’re creating a regular website. Chances are your choice method for publishing a website is also the best method for you to create a blog.

Lynette Chandler’s Blog

1 Subscribe to comments – This allows readers to receive updates on any comments made on a post, so they can keep in touch with ongoing discussions. You want to get readers involved with your posts so this is plugin is essential.

2 Adsense Deluxe – This makes it easier to manage your Adsense ads in your blog. If you decide that it makes sense for you to have Google Ads on your blog, this plugin will make your life simpler.

3 Chicklet Creator – A simple way to add feed buttons to your blog to make it easy for readers to subscribe to your blog.

4 Related posts – A list of 3 posts which are related to each post appears under each post, enabling blog visitors to read more about a topic of interest.

5 Message for new readers – A message welcomes new readers and asks if they would like to subscribe to the blog.

6 Category Cloud – Instead of a list of categories in sidebars, you have a cloud with different font sizes depending on the number of posts in each category. It looks much more attractive than a list.

7 Sociable – Members of social networking sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon to can easily tag your post. You want to encourage readers to submit posts to these sites and it can give your post wider exposure.

8 Google Sitemap – The site map makes it easier for your blog to be indexed by the major search engines.

9 Simple Tags – A simple method of adding Technorati tags to your posts so that the main blog search engine, Technorati, can catergorise your posts.

10 Feedburner Smith – detects all the ways to access your blog feed allowing Feedburner to track your subscribers. You want to have as much information as possible about subscribers and which posts are most popular.

Karen Bryan authors Business Blog Boost, http://www.businessblogboost.com , a blog to help businesses use blogging to market their business. Karen wants to pass on the benefit of her experience blogging for her travel business, http://www.europealacarte.co.uk/blog to help you boost your business with a blog.