ScrapBlog Series : First Things First
Monday, April 17, 2006 at 08:32PM 
Before You Start a Blog, Consider These:
1. Domain Names (For Serious Bloggers)
Many professional bloggers (and those of us who are "unprofessional" , lol) have long regretted not setting themselves up with a domain name before they started blogging. I have.
Domain names are cheap to buy nowadays (or rent for a period of one - two years), and should form part of your general agenda. If you are going to open a blog site, then think about getting yourself a domain name beforehand. That’s because many blogging services (free, or paid for) allow you to use your own domain name and have the actual hosted blog point to this, rather than having to provide your readers with an URL which contains the blogging service company name within it. (A prime example of this is the many typepad bloggers, all of whom have the blog name, then dot typepad after this, or my own blog, which has the Squarespace service name within it).
Why is this important?
Think about what needs to be done if you suddenly decide to move your blog elsewhere - which often happens with bloggers wanting to change from a free and limited service to a paid for but multi-featured service. For those people, you will need to somehow provide the updated new URL link for your blog - to everyone who has it! This includes all those people who have you on their blogroll (me, for instance), or sidebar - and you are most likely going to lose a few readers, which it may have taken you some time to establish.
Now, if you’d just had a simple domain address like, say, myspiffyscrapblog.com, then it would have simply taken a repoint to your new blog host address, and no one would be the wiser. But if the topic of domain names, and trying to work out how to direct this to a blog service address is too techno for you, then simply leave it be.
2. Comments
Before even evaluating a blog service, start thinking about your comment administration. Many services provide lots of security tools to allow for different levels of comments, but what you don’t want to do is start a blog with the decision to not allow comments at all. That’s kind of like preaching out there on the blogosphere, without giving anyone the opportunity to participate. So start thinking about what comments you want to allow - whether from only similar blog service users (the default for Blogger.com users is to only allow other blogger.com users to comment, for instance) or to allow comments with some authentication software (the random passwords) or to go the whole hog and allow anonymous comments, provided you keep a tight moderation of them.
3. What are your Blogging Objectives?
Why are you considering a blog in the first place, and what do you want to get out of it? Perhaps it’s just going to be a way to communicate at a personal level with friends and family which you select from (maybe even will password protect the access), or perhaps you will use the blog as a full-on marketing tool, to promote your scrapbooking work, resume, maybe even sell some scrapbook items from (many digital designers use their blogs with this market focus). Perhaps like the vast majority of scrapbloggers, it will be simply a small space on the web, where you can share your personal life, scrapbooking life, and maybe some of your layouts and projects with similarly-minded friends. Maybe you’re honest enough or intrigued enough to know that scrapblogging is all the rage, and you don’t know if it will be a correct fit for yourself, but you’d simply like to try it out.
Whatever the objective, decide on what you want to do long before you start evaluating your blog services.
4. Emails
Before you set up your blog, set up a new email address for it. Use a free web-based service like hotmail, googlemail, yahoomail or similar. Use this email address - and not your personal home email address! - for the contact address for you from the blog. This address will be spammed - people will either spam you from the address found on the blog, or spam the address simply by mechanised tools. Most of the web-based services have reasonably good spam-blockers nowadays, but because you’ve put an email address out there on the web, your email will be targetted.
To stop this a little, it is useful to put a contact subject into the html for the mail link. That way, when people do click on your mailto: link, their email application will already have a predefined subject header on it. Most people won’t change this, and let it go through when they are emailing you. This means you can tell by the subject title coming through to you in the web-based email whether it has been generated immediately from your own contact link on your blogsite, or whether it’s spam. There will still be people who go to your blog, use this mailto link and still spam you with marketing emails, but this should cut down on several.
The format for this mailto link might look a little like this (which happens to be my one, augmented a little, lol) Take out the curly brackets - they’re just there to stop the thing from becoming an actual link:
{mailto:scrapability@somewherewebbased.com?subject=Hello My Darling Talented Scrapability}
View Printer Friendly Version
Reader Comments (1)