Learning to Blog

As with all adventures, I find myself facing a whole lot of things that I know nothing about.  I’m sure that doesn’t surprise most of you.

As fantastic as I think it might be to document all the goings-on we have, such as the research I’m doing or the plans we make, I’m not sure I’m necessarily eager to share to much personal info.  While I doubt many strangers will follow along, there are a great many things that I am just not comfortable sharing about myself (especially regarding my health).   So we’ll play this by ear and see how it goes.

Today’s step toward boating was learning how to set up this blog site.  I have never done a blog before, nor has Julie, and so this has been quite educational.  I don’t know where to put the credit for the inspiration for starting this.  Perhaps it was divinely inspired (though I doubt HE cares), perhaps a memory prompted it, or maybe some subconscious vanity required me to seek the attention (let’s just agree to not acknowledge this one though, okay?).

I have no aspirations for this blog other than to keep people informed of where we are and what we are doing.   Even if we just end up back on the farm in MO, life there was filled with adventure and learning.   And while Facebook is a fine format, I thought something a little nicer (more formal ?) for sharing those adventures might be nice.

Julie and I talked over the idea and last night concluded (after not much consideration to be honest) that we liked the idea.  So today I jumped right in.   Just about all the credit goes for helping me get this up and running belongs to Amy Lynn Andrews from AmyLynnAndrews.com.  She gave very easy to follow steps, including screen grabs, of how to make this happen.

On the off chance that we find a fantastic life full of adventure on the high-seas AND that we can capture that excitement on our blog, it is possible to make a little money by blogging.  And not wanting to waste the (very slight) chance we decided against a free blog that offers hosting but they keep all the profits from ads and such.  So we had to find a good hosting site.

It didn’t take too many web article to find out that BlueHost is the place to go for that.  If you are willing to make a 3 year commitment BlueHost will host your blog for $70 per year.   That is not pocket change for me, but seemed to be just about right to 1) not have me abandon the project, and 2) not bankrupt me either.  It felt like it was a happy medium between the two.  If it was free (or near to it) it would be easy to just stop.   Much more though and it would have felt prohibitive.

So after establishing an account at BlueHost (about a 10 minute process) we were next establishing one with WordPress.org.  By all accounts WordPress is the premier blog creation software/site.  It was very easy to set up and finding advice for how to manage the blog is easy to find (I’m yet to determine if that advice is good).  I took much of my advice from the aforementioned Amy Lynn Andrews.

I’m know that there are things I don’t know.  I’m sure there are many things that I don’t know that I don’t know.  Hopefully that will come with time.

I’d say the process to get to this point (a blogsite that I can make posts on) was fairly easy.  If you’ve got a passion that you want to talk to the world about, but are hesitant about your computer skills, I say GO FOR IT!  It is simple to learn, and surprisingly exciting.