How about an idea of setting up your photo blog and publish the snaps you capture from mobile onto a photo blog instantly?

If you liked the above idea, then read on..
You need

1. A blog
2. A mobile phone which can connect to internet / at least can send out an email with attachments.

I started my photo blog on blogger, and later pointed the blogger blog to my custom domain name.

Method 1: Post photos directly to Blogger.

Creating a blog on blogger is free, and if you can you can buy a domain name and create a blog on it. I got into the passion of Mobile Photo Blogging recently and my Photo Blog has some snaps (some are crap, I do agree ).
Blogger and wordpress support emailing a post and publishing it online, that’s the feature ideal for mobile blogging as it’s quick, doesn’t eat up much of your time. If you are on blogger, under Settings > Email and Mobile, you can assign an email id to which you can send your posts and get it published.
This setup shouldn’t take up much of your time.

Now on your phone, after you capture a snap, just email it, adding a subject and body text to the same email address mentioned above, you are done! Your snap goes online within no time!!

If you are on blogger, your images will be saved in picasa, which has a limited storage of 1GB. I suggest Flickr instead of the above method.

Method 2: Post snps to Flickr and then post to blog, all with single email

Flickr gives 100MB of storage every month on free accounts.

Image quality is better on flickr than the ones stored by blogger/picasa and the one which gets embedded automatically when you send an email post.

So the method is slightly modified if you want to use Flickr as storage.
Flickr has option where you can email a new snap in, also they have an option to post to your blog from flickr. So here we will not be using the email id of blogger, instead we will be using email id to post to flickr and blog automatically.

Head towards Flickr, go to your account settings, under email tab, you can find the email id to send to Flickr. Additionally, you have to setup Flickr to access to your blog and post snaps automatically.
So you will be sending your snaps to Flickr email, which gets saved in Flickr and your blog is updated with a new photo post..

Interesting?

Scribfire is basically a firefox extension which allows you an easy way to manage your blog posts. You can work offline on a post using this extension on your browser, making n number of edits before actually publishing on to your blog.

Once you add this extension, you can set up your blog account in it and
start blogging right away. You need not go to and forth on your blog
admin panel to edit your posts, you can do it right from scribefire and
with one click post on to blog ! How is that?

Browse to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730 and add scribefire to your firefox. You can see a small quicklaunch icon of scribefire on your browser bottom tray. Once you click open, you can add a blog which already you post to by supplying credentials. I have tried this for my selfhosted as well as wordpress.com hosted blogs and it worker great.

Give it a try and post back what do you feel !

Below is a snapshot of me making this post from scribefire !

Windows live writer allows you to frame your blog post from your desktop or laptop and publish on to the blog using a single click ! This helps us treat blog posts just like a word or power point file, make necessary changes to your post, edit it locally in multiple sessions, while it is saved in your computer locally and publish at once. You need not go back and forth on your blogger or wordpress admin to make drafts and changes, everything is easy using Windows live writer.

Now coming to my issue, I tried creating a post on my wordpress blog (like this one) using Live writer, no issues for me to get it done. Only to make sure we check the XML-RPC publishing protocol on in wordpress writing settings.

Now when I tried posting into blogger, it gave me a 403 error and says could not upload or something like that. The issue was that my post contained images. While posting images into blogger, actually images are saved on to an album in your picasa account. When you post from blogger’s interface, an album matching to your blog name is automatically created. But, while posting from Windows live writer, it actually tries to upload to a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album in your picasa account, which might not be existing. Well in my case it wasn’t existing and that was the root cause for this issue.

I manually created a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on my picasa account and retried publishing the post from Live writer – Phew ! It worked !

So just in case you are facing the same issue as mine where you are getting a 403 error while trying to create a post on blogger, with the posts containing images, cross check whether you have a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on your picasa account. If not, add manually and retry. It should work fine.

Let me know if this post helped you in any way !

WordPress has plugin support. You can attach functionalities to your blog without even touching the core code files ! Yes, thats through plugins. Check out wordpress plugin directory to see what are the functionality additions available.

I am currently using following plugins in this blog.

• Askimet: A must for a blog like this. It prevents comment spam. You need an API key to activate this plugin, which is available at wordpress.com.
• Google-analytics-for-wordpress: You can add Google analytics code by directly editing your theme files. This poses a risk of no data being captured when you change the theme and forget to add code to the new theme. Solution is to use this plugin, which adds analytics code on your pages automatically – Yes, no code editing and pasting analytics code is required each time you change theme.
• Lightbox-2-wordpress-plugin: Lightbox.js is a JavaScript framework to display images and web pages within overlays. You can see lightbox in action on the post – public/private key authentication with PuTTY on fedora 10. View those snapshots by clicking on them, it opens in a layer on the same window rather than opening as a new page !
• official-statcounter-plugin-for-wordpress: This is another plugin similar to the Google analytics plugin mentioned above, only differene being, it embeds statcounter tracking codes on pages automatically. Statcounter is the first web analytics tool I have used and still using. It is cool !
• wordpress-mobile-edition: This website has a mobile friendly version too ! This feature is achieved by using this plugin as well as a different theme compatible for mobile browsers.
• wp-contact-form: I am using this on my contact page. You need not code a contact form and the server sided script to handle the form yourself. This plugin can do the job.
• FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin: This is to use feedburner as my default feed manager than the one built in in wordpress. This plugin automatically redirects visitors to the built-in feed url to the feedburner feed url.
• youtubebrackets: This is one of the plugins I have used a lot in my other blogs. This helps us embed youtube videos on wordpress posts.

I am sure this will not be an exclusive list as days pass. I might be adding some more cool plugins on this blog. I will update this post as and when a new plugin is added.

Well, you can start blogging with no investment! Yes, absolutely no investments, but still can earn some money out of your blog. Interesting?

There are free blog service providers, you can get a blog published. Following are some of the good free blog hosting providers.

1. Blogger (free) – The number one choice if you are a blogger who want to also earn money by placing ads on your blog. Blogger is currently part of Google so you can sign up with a Google account or create a new account. Your blog will be hosted in a subdomain of blogspot – yourblog.blogspot.com.
2. WordPress.com (free) – WordPress is a well known blogging software, and wordpress.com provides free blog hosting using the wordpress mu software. What you get is a blog hosted in a subdomain like yourblog.wordpress.com . The advantage for wordpress.com hosted blogs over blogger hosted blogs are that you can make use of the extra functionalities of the wordpress blogging software. The main disadvantage for a blogger on a wordpress.com hosted blogs are that, it does not give much monetization capabilities like blogger hosted blogs

Above are the ones suited in case you are planning to kick start your blog with ‘zero‘ investment.

In case you are interested in running a blog like WebReviewer.info, still it doesn’t cost too much I would say..

What you need is a domain name like – webreviewer.info and a hosting account to host your web pages / blogging software.

For these self hosted blogs, I suggest WordPress. I mentioned about the wordpress.com free blog hosting, but the software I am referring here is the freely download able version of wordpress which you can use to set up a blog on your web hosting account. WordPress needs PHP and MySQL , hence you need to choose a web host and an account which has PHP and MySQL support. I suggest a Linux webhost for these self hosted wordpress blogs.

The cost – A .info domain you can get for as low as 0.99$ at Godaddy.com and .com domain starts at around 8$. If you would like to read what are these .info and .com, read my earlier post – whats in a domain name extension.

I have been blogging (though not so regular) for last 3+ years. If you have any queries, post it here, I can do my best to help you with your domain name registration, web hosting, blog setup etc.

If you are looking for one of the previous versions of wordpress (wordpress.org ), here is the link, each and every release for you to download !!

http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/

Enjoy !!

Great bloggers are the ones who express what they are master in it , say a finance expert writing his views on economy, his interpretations.. If you cant express things in your own words, a blog is not for you !!

Do you need a blog to copy paste what others have written or uttered ??

This approach is absolutely wrong, unless you express the same in our own way/easily understandable manner, with some extra information/interpretation, copying articles on internet and publishing in ones own blog is stupidity at first point next to legal issues, search engine copy content penalities etc..

Please read my disclaimer before posting opposite arguments.

Few basics…..

You can set up your blog with any of the blog service provider or you can set it yourself under your own website name (for eg: ramkumarsblog.com )

The first option is the best if you are not familiar with jargons like domain registration, web hosting, linux server, apache, mod_rewrite………….. (relax….. need not to get tensed). The best free blog service providers as far as I know are blogger.com and wordpress.com . You can just sign up at their site and make your blog live within minutes.

Second option – set up your own blog under your domain name. I am familiar with both, but in this option I have no second choice to wordpress as a blogging software. You need to have a domain name (eg: ramkumarspeaks.com )if you havent registered one, register it with a good domain registrar such as Godaddy.com .

Once you have registered a domain name, choose a blogging software. There are many – wordpress,movable type etc. I recommend wordpress. download a recent version from wordpress.org – its free!!. Now you need a hosting account. WordPress needs linux server with PHP and MySQL so you need to consult your hosting company to confirm that they have everything for your wordpress blog. Thats it, you can start blogging.

Changing the look and feel of your blog

1. Blogs hosted by wordpress.com (i.e somename.wordpress.com ) – Login to your admin panel > presentation > Themes . Here you can see many themes just by clicking it it will get activated and will be the theme of your blog.
2. Self hosted blogs running on wordpress. Here when you install, you can find only 2 default themes as explained in the step 1 above. Go to themes.wordpress.net , you can choose a beautiful theme for yourself. You need to download the theme from there, which will be zipped. You need to extract the files and the whole folder of the new theme, you need to upload at /wp-content/themes/ folder of your blog. Now, presentation > Themes will show up the new theme you just uploaded. Clicking on the theme snapshot, it will be activated. Thats it !! Pretty simple isn’t it?