Bloggers (another boring question!)

Well its a diary isn't it, though for me a more private affair, I don't have mine listed on here. I do quite enjoy reading others though.

As a form of diary

Blogger

KK (OH) told me to, and he knows about these things - I don't have a clue

Why:

When I first started with my allotment I had quite a few friends and relatives wanting to know how I was getting on. Using a blog was/is easier than emailing updates/photos to 20/30 people. Unfortunately I've let it slip a bit and haven't updated for a while. It also helps vent any frustrations/anxiety I have about what I'm doing. *makes mental note to set aside some time.

What:

Blogger - it was the first that came up when I googled, and seemed fairly easy to get set up and going on.

i do mine at work lol and i like to look back on how far ive come

"Why do you Blog ?"

To make it easy to tell friends, family, and forum-folk where I have got to with my projects and to publish "news".

I could do this with a Word document, or whatever, but I like the ability to Link sections and have some picture-management (pasting a picture into Word makes huge unwieldy documents IME)

"What do you use to Blog ?"

Wordpress

"Why did you choose what you use to Blog ?"

I use Wordpress because it has the ability to have Pages (like a web site) as well as Blog/Diary type entries.

My daughter uses Blogger, so I had tried that before I choose Wordpress for my blog.

My advice would be to open an account with all the Big Names (which is probably Blogger, Wordpress and Moveable Type), set the account to private / Not Googled etc., put some material in, "Publish it" [but only you know it is there, so in effect it is private] and see which you like. You can just cut & paste the text from the first one you set up to the others you want to try.

My wishlist is:

Easy editing that doesn't go Pear Shaped. WYSIWYG editors in web pages are notoriously fickle about mucking up the content with broken tags - so boldface, set to heading, un-boldface, change to underlined type actions are often misunderstood (which does not happen with Word etc.), so make sure you are happy with that.

Easy picture uploading. I want to be able to upload several pictures at once (much easier to select half a dozen from a folder, rather than having to reselect the folder and a single picture six times) and then plonk the pictures where I want them in the page.

Ability to resize / crop pictures after uploading may be important to you. I'm a computer techie, so I have skills to do all that on my PC, but if that isn't you then doing it on-line may be important (but doing it on-line will mean you will have to upload large-sized image files to then edit / shrink them on-line, so that will take longer than resizing off-line and uploading smaller files)

Worth checking out the Management side of the blog as well - can you deal with comments / spam? Prevent foul-language comments, whatever? (Wordpress lets you preview comments, and allow people who have had a comment "published" to then create comments that don't have to be checked before being published.)

Private pages - I have some pages with a password on which I can let Friends and Family see, but I would prefer that such folk had to register, and then I could make Groups from them and allow them to see certain areas of the blog (I'm not keen to publish personal details about friends and family for everyone to see; your paranoia level may be lower!!)

My blog is just a record for me so that I can see progress. Its on here, I don't publicise it as I think it would be quite boring to anyone else. It reminds me of what progress I've made and things I've yet to do.

I use blogger - I had a year of using Yahoo 360 but it made for a boring page - one pic per entry. Sometimes you just need more!
As people have said, it's a diary for me, to log what I did and when. It's amazing how you think you remember when you sowed such and such but you don't. You can check with photos on what colour flower a certain bean or pea had too.
I have friends in the quilting world who like to keep tabs on my 'other life' and has been said, you don't need to tell everyone separately, you give them the link and they can look is they choose.
I also think it's how my daughter knows what I'm up to!
My actual diary is too small to record sowing even one pack of seeds per day and as we all know there are days in spring when you spend ages sowing or pricking out.

Our blog is a place for me to post just where we are at, share piccies of how the plot looks, share successes and failures and provide inspiration for any that want to view it! Its also a useful aide memoire on what we did and when we did it, and means I dont feel as though I need to post loads of threads and piccies on the vine that I'd like to share, those that wish to see our blog can click on the link, and those who have no interest in the piccies and info dont have to scroll past threads that just highlight crops we've had or piccies we've taken!

My blog, like many others, is a place to record what I've done, what's looking good. It started off as a record of the allotment, but has morphed a bit now, as there's only so many times I can write 'weeded a lot'. So now it's also somewhere to put garden photos.

I enjoy looking at other people's blogs as they all have something interesting to look at or to learn.

I use Blogger, simply because it was the first one I came across when I decided to start a blog. I'd probably use Wordpress if I knew then what I know now, as it lets you have pages (and isn't blocked by my works network system, like Blogger is!)

i like my blog (i use blogger, because I saw HeyWaynes and it looked good) it lets me see my veggies growing, as this is my first year i can list all of my mistakes and what i would do next year, also so my family can see, especially as my sis is emmigrating she wants to learn how to grow veggies in NZ.

I look at my sweetcorn as little seedlings and think OMG they are that big already, where has the time gone and then i feel proud and pat myself on the back ha ha !!

Do one, you will so enjoy it!

SS

Possibly a silly question~but I make no secret of being a computer newbie!!~Do you do your blog via Grapevine or something else?(blogger?what's that?)~is it then easy enough to transfer? Also what's an "askimet key"?~when I looked on the blog option control panel it said you could have this to prevent spam.
We'd really like to start one as a record of what we've done but really haven't a clue!

"Do you do your blog via Grapevine or something else?(blogger?what's that?)"

Something else

https://www.blogger.com/start
WordPress.com - FWIW this is the one I use
https://www.livejournal.com/create.bml (Moveable Type) or their tour: Quick Tour

"is it then easy enough to transfer?"

Transfer content from one Blogging site to another? Probably hard. Need to make the right choice first time really, hence I would suggest setting up, say, 5 pages on each and seeing which one you like. You can cut & paste the content from the 1st to the subsequent test sites, but you might lose your formatting, and you will have to upload any photos separately for each. Shouldn't take more than an hour to create an account and set up 5 test pages' But you might want to mess around trying different template designs etc. which will probably take a longer - unless you are very quick at making style choices!

"what's an "askimet key"?"

People can leave comments on your blog pages. This is a means of trying to detect if the comments are spam, or not. If it marks something as spam, and you check it in the management tools, you can mark it as "normal" instead, and then the comment will show on the site. There are various other algorithms for deciding a particular message is Spam, mostly based on Bayesian filters.

Some useful comparison and advice here:

Blogging Software - Blogging Software Providers Comparison

Quote "For bloggers who are looking for a free blogging software that allows monetization, you may want to try Blogger. If monetization is not important to you, then Wordpress.com might be a better choice.

For bloggers who want full customization and advanced feature capability (and aren't afraid of technical challenges and out-of-pocket expenses), Wordpress.org and TypePad are excellent choices."

Cheers Kristen!~think it may be a while before the blog gets started!!Quite proud I'm now typing with 2 fingers!!Maybe Andi can have a look at the w/e~meaning absolutely no offence to you(I'm totally grateful for your help!)but I've not really got a clue what any of the above means!~Guess for now I'll stick to good old fashioned pen & paper!
But I WILL eventually learn!~or just wait til Daisy can set it up for me!