A Blog By Any Other Name
Over the years I have started and maintained several different web sites, and even some intranets for companies that I worked for.
At first I hand coded HTML using a basic text editor, then I hand coded using a programmer’s editor called EditPlus. I tried to keep my sites simple. I didn’t use must formatting. I had very basic CSS files. I am a programmer not a designer so layout and fonts and colour schemes are not my strong point.
I tried various WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage and HotMetal (though I was never very happy with them). But eventually I had to admit that I needed something more that a site with a handful of static pages. So I started my journey into the wild landscape of CMS’s. I will not list all the CMS’s that I tried, At one stage or another I have tried the top 8 on one or another of my web sites(Most of my web sites are gone by the wayside). I don’t want to start any flame wars, I found nothing wrong with any of them, they just didn’t suit me. I had come across blogs, of course, but I didn’t want software just for making a web journal.
Then I came across an article explaining how to give a WordPress a fixed front page. Hey, I thought, That sounds interesting, you might be able to make your blog look like a “normal” web site with a fixed home page.
Then I looked into WordPress a little more closely and realised they had the concept of pages. And I realised that WordPress could be used for a CMS rather than just a blog. (Abhijit Nadgouda has a recent post about the advantages of using WordPress for a simple web site CMS.)
But after I converted my site to WordPress I decided it was a bit of a waste having the ability to blog built into the software if I didn’t use these features. So I started to use the blogging features to make announcements about updates to my site.
Now that I had a blog I started to search the web for more information about blogs and I found that some people were making money by blogging, in fact that some people were making very good money by blogging.
I decided that I would like to do just that. But I didn’t know where to start. So I searched around a little bit more, and after several false starts, came across Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint, a free ebook that outlines how to make a full time income from blogging part time. Now I am trying to follow Yaro’s advice and set my blog up as source of income to support myself in my writing career.
So am I a blogger, am I just using WordPress as a “cut down” CMS, or am I really a novelist experimenting with a new medium.
Well, who cares?
A blog by any other name is still a web site. And as a writer I am just happy that I have an outlet that allows other people to read my words.