I’ve been blogging, twittering and tumbling on various sites. What I haven’t done is set up a serious blogging platform until now. I figure I’d start my first blog on this while it’s all fresh in my memory.

This isn’t totally new territory for me.  I’ve been reading blogs from a number of friends and even helped others set up their own page. I’ve created blogs on Blogger, and wordpress.com and tumblr.  If you JUST want to blog, these are good places to get started. What I was interested in was something more serious.  If you do too, here are some steps.

Step 1.

The first step is to find a good service to support your blog.  I’m using startlogic.com and have friends that have recommended bluehost.  you can do this very cheaply.  I’d recommend a couple sites for finding a good deal:

• Hosting Review
• Host Critque

Step 2.

You need to find a good domain name. One service that help you with this is NameBoy.  It not only checks if your name is available, it will also make suggestions for alternative names. Often, you get your name registered as part of the hosting service’s fee. Otherwise, GoDaddy or many others will do this for you.

Step 3.

The next step is to install blogging software. Wordpress was recommended by most of my serious blogging friends. You can try it out on wordpress.com but its limited in what you can do. I started here but later moved onto this blog.

You can get the software at wordpress.org but you might first check if your hosting provider already provides it for you. Some have “one click” installs.  If not, you will need to upload the software using FTP and also set up a database.  The good folks at Wordpress will tell you how to do this.

Step 4.

Since you are setting up a “serious” blog, you probably don’t want the default theme. You can find all kinds of themes on the wordpress.org site .  There are also many other themes if you just search for “wordpress themes”.  One thing you want to do is get a “widget ready” theme. This will allow you to add all kinds of cool stuff to your page.

Step 5.

Find some Plugins. These are heavy duty tools you can use to make Wordpress do whatever you want.  In my case, I got the Disqus plugin to mange user comments and allow users to post Seesmic video comments.  I also got a plugin for twitter and another one for Flickr. Lastly, you might check out Addthis.com which lets you provide a simple way for readers to add a link to your blog from there Del.icio.us, Facebook, twitter or other social media application.

Step 6.

Pick your widgets. find more. Some widgets will come with your Wordpress installation. Others you can add as is done with the plugins.  Widgets usually show up in the sidebars for your theme. These might be calendars, your own HTML text, RSS feeds, lists of comments on your blog, whatever.  Many plugins will create their own widgets so you can place them where you want.  For example, my flickr plugin works this way.

step 7.

you probably want to know how much your blog is being accessed, what posts are good and from where people are coming to view your blog.  Google Analytics provides a free way to do this.  All you have to do is insert a bit of code into your blog  (I added it as a “Text Widget”) and each day Google will prepare a nice report with more information than you could ever want.

That is it

 You now have a very powerful bloging platform that can do just about anything, is dynamic and atractive, and integrated with other social media applications.