Hosted with Your own Petard

Domain or not to domain that is the question...

A domain will always cost something.  As of the writing, they cost about $10. You can find sales. I saw one for or 99 cents from Godaddy.com. So look around. But $10 is not that much to start.

Think of a domain as a RV and the host is the campground where you park it.

Hosting usually costs from a few dollars to many dollars per month, depending on the services that you need and/or want. Hosting is also more involved than being hosted by Blogger.com or WordPress.com.
But you have more control and can customize your sight more. Your sight will look more professional and will be easier to remember if you have a domain name. www.yourdomain.com versus www.yourdomain.wordpress.com or www.yourdomain.blogspot.com

You are more likely to have back up when you have a domain name and a hosting company.  Google has an offshoot called Data Liberation. among their many offerings is a backup feature.

Through Blogger, Google will hosts a custom domain for free: http://www.blogger.com/features
You can use a domain that you already have or use the tools from Blogger and Google Apps. Although I found the tools less than intuitive (more on that later).

So far this post has been pretty Blogger.com heavy. This is because many of the things Google offers for free. You can also start off slower and learn little by little with Blogger. Ultimately, I think that having your own domain and host with the WordPress software (which is free) installed, will allow the most flexibility, control and customization. There are a myriad of "Plug Ins" to do just about anything you can imagine and you can create your own, if they don't have what you want and you are tech savvy. Also WordPress.com inserts ads at its own discretion. Blogger on the other hand only adds them if you sign up for Adsense. Adsense is an avenue for monetizing your sight. Adsense also customizes the ads to the user viewing the page. Some think this is intrusive and Big Brother like. I do not. I like the fact that I may actually want to click on the ads, because they interest me and may lead me to something I want to get involved with. WordPress does have an Adsense plug in, that you can install in your own host.



Google works with you with Adsense, while Wordpress.com charges you $30 per year to be add free, you can use Adsense with a Wordpress.

So I decided to buy a domain and let Blogger host is for free. I was making it harder than I had to, it seems, as I could not find the correct tutorial, right away and I was afraid to click the radio button for "On a top-level domain (www.example.com)"  or "On a sub domain (foo.example.com)". I thought that would restart the process.

I am finding that, often, the steps needed to use Google products require going back to a previous page and doing something else. Itis not a linear process.

Here are the directions I found first, I think from the Google Wallet page, they are similar, but are related to installing Google apps, not getting your custom domain name up and running on Blogger. These directions also demonstrate the back and forth nature of the steps that it takes to use some Google products.

You get an E-Mail from Google Apps telling your domain has been registered, but the help link "https://www.google.com/support/a" brings you to a page with a lot of links on it, not directly to instructions you need. So it took a lot of fishing. I don't like fishing much, as I see it, the only use of fishing is to drink beer with my dad (bonus if you get to have fish diner)

Here are a few examples of what you get for what you pay.

                              WordPress         Blogger
Storage                  3GB storage       1GB Pictures on Picasa 250k per picture (mobile)
Custom Domain     $13 and up          $10
Ads Free               $30                     Adsense if you make an account(see above)

I admit that this post is two dimensional.

Here are posts on Problogger and other links, which I found helpful: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/15/choosing-a-blog-platform/comment-page-3/

http://wordpress.org/showcase/

2006 platform poll http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/01/18/blog-platforms-poll-results/

Google+ $2.49 per month for aditional 25GB http://support.google.com/picasa/answer/39567/
http://support.google.com/picasa/answer/1224181?hl=en&ref_topic=1399133

Business Gmail for $5/user 25GB of storage, through Google Apps/enterprise/apps/business/products.html#sites

WordPress space upgrade: http://en.support.wordpress.com/space-upgrade/

Google Hangouts

This seems cool. It is like  a video chat with up to 9 other people. There is a check in at 150 minutes to see if you are still there, that is 2 and a half hours. Enough for some bike rides. I wonder if I could stream an entire ride?

http://support.google.com/plus/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1257349
http://support.google.com/plus/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1651183&parent=1257349&ctx=topic
http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1216374

You can edit it afterwards and share the recording too!
https://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2553119&topic=2553242&rd=1

I will have to see if the GoPro camera and wifi dealibopper can use a phone to do this.

To Pseudonym or not to Pseudonym

Pseu psue psuedio

Do you want to have a Google+ account and a separate Blogger account or just a Google+ account?

Video

While I a still trying to decide what my options are to merge my Google+ account, Blogger and You tube, I have used the my IPhone to up load a video to YouTube. Then on the PC make a blog and import the video http://jeffohara.blogspot.com/2013/01/happy-new-year.html. Unlike photos, IPhone can't upload a video directly to Blogger yet. I hope they do it soon as I really want to upload video remotely. You can't even pull video off of YouTube on a mobile device!

So it is a 2 step process and only on the PC.

YouTube has 15 minute limit per video, but uploads seem to be unlimited.
http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1047381

Change your limit here, but I think it counts towards your allotted space then:
http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=71673 

http://www.google.com/intl/en/mobile/+/ is where Google+ and Blogger sends you when you choose Instant Upload. but the "Not on Android ? Get Google" button does not seem to work. When I when to that page on the IPhone, it showed a bunch of apps, including G+, Blogger and YouTube. I had the first two, so I downloaded the YouTube app and no option there either. I even checked back on the G+ app and pictures yes no sign of video.


http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=67428
http://www.virante.org/blog/2012/08/28/claiming-your-google-plus-name-on-youtube-and-why-you-should/

Post Labels

Labels are Bloggers way to organize content, but even better, because a post can or should be associated with only one category, but many "Labels". They are called tags other places.  Up to 20 tags & 200 characters, per post and 2000 different Labels per blog

http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44498

Wordpres has categories and with 2.5, tags. Now you just have to pick your tags to sort your posts by.

http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/categories-vs-tags-seo-best-practices-which-one-is-better/

http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/

Calendar

Use a page to share your Google calendar.  I would set up one specific to the blog, not necessarily your personal calendar.  You can make as many calendars on your main calendar and choose one or more to share. http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1186917

Keep them hungry for (More...) Jump break

I was wondering what that meant

Share Buttons

After starting Evolution of a Blogger, I noticed that the share buttons appeared in every post. Do you know how much time I spent looking for a way to do that to first blog http://jeffohara.blogspot.com/??

Well that right there made it worth starting up this new blog.  I am sure it is in a tutorial somewhere that I just have not found yet or did not have the best key words, when I went to search for it. It must have been a new feature since my first lame halfhearted attempt at blogging. Click Edit in the Blog Post section of Layout from the Blogspot dashboard and click the box that says Show Share Buttons and save. If you have a newer blog, it is probably checked by default, so remove the check if you want to disable the share buttons on every post. I suppose if your blog is private, sharing would probably not be a good idea, otherwise, I think most bloggers are either neutral or are for getting the their blogs mentioned in the social media and I bet many readers would like to be able to easily share you posts, if they like them (hopefully)

Pages

I read somewhere on the Internet that you need as many as 50 pages to be relevant on the Internet or for search engines to take you seriously.  I read somewhere else, again in the Internet, that 10 to 25 pages of content would get you started.  Blogger.com has a tool on the dashboard.

You make a new page much like you make a new post, with Title and content, followed by Publishing it. 

It looks like a post with comments section, which can be turned off.

You can choose how to get to the paged with the drop down pictured above.

Make Page for videos or articles longer that you want to put into a post.  Link to them from particular post that are pertinent and they have more of a chance to get noticed.

As far as I can see the format will be the same as the original blog.

10 page limit. But I read 20 here: http://www.bloggersentral.com/2011/03/limits-on-blogger-account.html

Think about your page name and it's effect SEO

Organization is a Four Letter Word

To paraphrase the song by the band Cake, really organization should be your friend, but organization and I are kind of like Frenemies. So I will attempt to use draft to keep my thoughts in one place, where I can water them, feed them, give them sunlight and nurture them until they are ready for the world, well mostly anyway.

Herky Jerky

Sorry if this is herky/jerky. It will probably begin with fits and starts. So I have all this information to blog about and soon as I made my first entry, I find a interesting setting on the Blogspot Dash board; Pages. Now I have seen this before, but like in a game of Concentration with a million items to match I sometimes have to stumble across it again.  My sister asked me "Why I did not take a class?" I told her I learn from doing, not so much from remembering, I always have figured stuff out better than remembering things.  The later probably created the need for the former.

Publishing Procrastination

While this maybe obvious to many, particularly if you were a English or Journalism major, after my initial post, I had some other pent up thoughts.  I figured that it may be better to publish one a day instead of jamming them all out and then having a drought.  Putting off publishing also lets me think about a post and edit it and make it more complete before anyone sees it.  Not that that is important in these early stages :-)