I’m going to start a blog to keep myself in practice writing for public audiences and say things that I don’t expect anyone to read (but that are SFW.)
Knowing nothing about blogging, I was just thinking of getting a Wordpress account and starting.
Any thoughts, advice, opinions, or things that you wish you knew when you started a blog?
I’ve found Wordpress much easier to use than other free blogging services I’ve tried. If you care about how the blog looks, you can just pay for the custom CSS upgrade and bob’s your uncle.
I guess the one thing I’d warn you about is that blogs are public. Even if you don’t think anyone will read them, people will. More people than you know. Some of your entries will get pretty high ranking on google, for reasons mysterious to everyone including yourself. And if you offer enough personal information, people you know in real life will start reading. Keep all of that very seriously in mind. Do not ever talk about your job on your blog.
Come back and ask again if you want more publicity later.
Write as often as you possibly can, even if it’s just a short paragraph each day. That is the single most important thing you can do. Other good things to get in a habit of doing are adding tags to your posts as you submit them, and adding a picture when you think of it and/or it’s appropriate.
Don’t pigeonhole your blog with the title–if you keep it up, it may go in a totally different direction than you originally planned, and it’s not great (as I have learned) if you originally set it up with too narrow a focus. Name it something that could include lots of areas.
Anyone work with Joomla and can contrast it with Wordpress?
I love blogging with WordPress. I started my blog about 3 years ago and eventually turned it into a full fledged website (it’s super cheap to purchase a domain name through them). Unfortunately I don’t get a huge amount of readers, I mostly share it through Facebook, but it does pop up if I do a google search of certain things I’ve written about. I’d say just go for it and as stated above, don’t write about your job or anything that may potentially offend your friends (unless you don’t care what they think).