Do you run a blog?

Fire

I would be interested to hear about your experiences of running a blog or a personal (non commercial) website.

Thanks x

robairdmacraignil

Hi,

I had a non commercial website for a couple of years about 15 years ago but since it was my brother helped me set it up it turned out to not be very easy to get him to upgrade it to something I thought would be more useful. I wanted to add a forum type function to it but he was always too busy to help introduce this. The final straw before I gave up on it was when it started to get hacked repeatedly and my content was replaced with some Arabic material. The website was called freepower.ie and I mostly just reviewed news on renewable energy in Ireland so someone recently suggested it might have been the oil companies wanted to shut me down. I'm more inclined to think it was just random hacking from someone who could see my brothers server was not staffed with a full time internet security person and was an easy target.

If starting such a website again I think we agreed that using one of the more mainstream website providers like wordpress would be the way to go to avoid having to deal with security problems myself. I since then have kept a simple video blog of my gardening progress on the youtube channel that is usually linked at the end of my posts here. Youtube.com channels can be set up for free and have no charges for maintaining the channel which is better than keeping a website which has costs each year. There are far more subscribers and video views than I would have expected to get with the youtube channel so it has been overall a fairly positive experience.

Happy gardening!

Fire

Interesting @robairdmacraignil . I hadn't considered the extra security that wordpress offers. I turned off the 'see signatures' function when I joined the forum so I have never seen your weblink.

I've run and experimented with setting up, running and experimenting with various small websites and blogs over 20 years, with great variance of success. I ran a daily image blog for my neighbourhood for exactly one year which I loved. Pretty much images, little text. I want to start another image blog for myself, this time. Things seem to have got more expensive and more limited on the blogging platforms like Wordpress and they are introducing more storage caps..

WP seem to be offering a package of £7pcm(£85 pa) for 13GB of storage. That price will no doubt go up over time.

I'm wondering how other people are doing it. Lot of storage and low, stable pricing, are priorities for me.

robairdmacraignil

I did not realize that some users of the forum here would not see the link to the video blog I keep about gardening so here is the link if you are interested in seeing it: https://www.youtube.com/user/sustainableveg/videos

Was thinking of adding it to the thread recently posted on youtube channels but what I post is a bit more amateurish than some other ones already listed. Sorry I can't really advise on the project your thinking of starting as I don't really post still photos anywhere.

All the best!<br>

SYinUSA

I used to keep a couple of personal blogs on blogger. It was quite intuitive and easy to manage. I used it as a journal of our DIY house projects and of the kids, no monetization or commercial aspect whatsoever. If there was any limit or cap, I never came close. I think you can use a purchased domain, but I used the free "*.blogspot.com" address.

Simone_in_Wiltshire

Fire: I hadn't considered the extra security that wordpress offers.

Wordpress the software itself is already the problem. If I were forced to use it I had a .htaccess file that allows only me to access the blog.
There are alternatives out there.

Simone_in_Wiltshire

@robairdmacraignil
<p>Nice videos </p>