Things to do when starting a blog

Well, starting up a new blog has certainly made it clear to me the steps that are needed to try and get things settled and moving quickly.

1. Install WordPress. Ok, so I am a WordPress guy, and most of this will be WP specific. If you don’t have your own server or hosting, use WordPress.com.

2. Get a theme. I think settling on a theme early is a good idea. Too much messing and switching about can make you think more about style than content. Actually – work out which theme you are going to use before you set up the blog. Then the decision’s made.

3. Set up a FeedBurner account. Using these guys to handle your feed makes life loads easier – and provides heaps of useful info on how people are accessing your site, and how many are reading your feed. Oh, and to make life even easier, install and activate Steve Smith’s FeedBurner plug-in.

4. Install and activate the Akismet, Simple Tags and Email Subscriptions plug-ins. Each will either make your readers’ lives, or yours, simpler.

5. Start reading, quoting and commenting on blogs. Find an aggregator you like, subscribe to any feed you find that might be interesting. Link back to articles, quote people, comment on blogs. make sure it’s all relevant and traffic may be increased to your site.

6. Claim your blog on Technorati. This will increase the liklihood of your posts popping up in searches. Using tags will help here too.

No doubt more things will occur to me later. Check the comments for those.

[tags]blogging, wordpress[/tags]

Tagging

One of the recommended actions for any blogger to take is to tag their posts, inserting appropriate links at the end of the post to a service like Technorati, say, which might be of use to a reader and will help increase the numbers of those visiting your blog. Hopefully.

I’ve been looking at a few ways of doing this. Some of the offline blogging tools allow you to do it – Qumana does, as indeed does Ecto. Most of my posts are made when I am away from my PC at home, and are therefore through the WordPress admin panel on the web. I had a crack, as Lorelle suggests, with Ultimate Tag Warrior, and found it a total pain in the arse – far too complicated for my liking.

Then Neville Hobson, who is clearly the King of WordPress plug-in recommendations, put forward the suggestion of Simple Tags – the title of which was music to my ears. It works beautifully – simply by adding the tags at the end of the post surrounded by the word tags in square brackets – like those you’d use on most forum systems these days.

Mega!

[tags]tags, wordpress, technorati[/tags]

Kiko

Kiko is another online calendar service. It’s filled with lots of lovely little AJAXy tricks and generally looks lovely.

Kiko

One of the cool features include having a text box which allows you to quickly add appointments using a human readable syntax, which is nice.

The problem with the site at the moment is that it is soooo sloooooow. Until they get that sorted, I will still be a HipCal user. But I shall be keeping a close eye on Kiko.

The question that everyone is asking, of course, is whether Kiko is named after the footballer:

Kiko

I think we should be told.

Load more posts!