Recently I have been helping several friends setting up their blogs. Most of them are using MSN space, which I don’t really like for two reasons: 1) too many restrictions on customising your own template, 2) most people like to mess up with the HTML editor and change the size of fonts and color in every single post, which makes them unreadable. Some of my Chinese friends use Chinese BSP (Blog Service Provider) like blogbus or blogcn. They are ok, but as most Chinese BSP have self-censor system to get rid of sensitive keywords. Also, you cannot control what kind of ads they will put in your blogs. You may see some hot girl photos flying around your blog and can’t do anything about that.

So, my advice would be set up your own blog. How? Here are a few tips from me.

(1) Buy your own domain

It’s not expensive to have your own domain. Go to GoDaddy.com to pick up one. I’m sure most people can afford. The biggest advantage of owning a domain is that you have total control of your blog. People only need to remember your domain (like mine “RichardHong.com”) and they can visit your blog or website whenever in the future, even when you change your host or simply just want to redirect it to any site you like. So get one. “.cn” is even cheaper, 1 yuan per year I think.

(2) Use a blogging software

If you like to play around with softwares and have the time and interest to learn, I recommend to buy a host and use a blogging software to write a blog.

For hosting, I have been using Dreamhost more than a year and very happy with their services. If you want to get one, either enter my promotional code (FRHong) or click here to register, you can get a huge discount. But of course, this is an option, not an ad. Other than Dreamhost, there are thousands of hosting company you can choose too. Just google it.

For blogging software, I am using Wordpress and strongly recommend it as well. Alternatively, Movable Type seems to be a good one, although I haven’t tried it before.

(3) Using Blogger.com

If you just want to write something and can’t be bothered to learn complicated stuff, then Blogger.com is good option. It’s simply, easy and highly customisable. However, if you are in China, your blog may be blocked occasionally. In that case, you can use their FTP publishing function to publish. But you need your own domain and a bit web space. An example of publishing through own domain using Blogger.com is my Japanese blog, JP.RichardHong.com.

If you don’t like something more advanced than blogger.com, BSP like wordpress.com or Typepad can also give you free blogging services. However, they are blocked in China.

There are thousands of “how to blog” guides out there on the net, but these are what I recommend. Hope it will be useful to you. If you need any help, leave your questions in the comment.

First of all I need to thank those who let me by email or in Gtalk about having difficulty getting to my blog, really appreciate that! And I was also happy that people are reading my blog and check it frequently, a big motivation for me!

About the problem, it was a power outage in Dreamhost. I thought the guys wouldn’t take long to solve the problems, until it lasted for two days, so I dropped them a message. They replied within one hour, which was pretty impressive, and told me they changed the IP of my domain, I just need to modify it myself. I did, and problem solved, now my blog is back! Yeah!

If there is any problem in future, I will try to be the first one to know and solve it asap. However if you have any difficulties of accessing or posting comment, please do let me know, because I can’t use check those functions myself frequently. Appreciate that, thank you!

Ok, happy blogging, happy reading!

I spent about the whole night last night and a few hours today to redesign WeAreTalking.net. I used Damn.be’s Milc3 template as the basic structure and add some more visual buttons to replace text links. It looks better now I think. Also, I changed the display post number into only one in index and use this hack to show up all posts when view archive and category.

It’s so much fun to do the design, but it’s very time consuming as well. However a good blog is not all about the its design unless it’s a designer’s blog, what’s more important is the CONTENT. Wang Jianshuo’s blog is one the examples. I guess he is geeky guy who will enjoy playing around with plugin and coding stuff, but he try to prevent that in his blog, instead, he focus more on the contents and the consistence of writing. Although his blog’s design cannot be any simpler, its traffic will probably make most blogger jealous.

I think I should put more useful and interesting contents rather than spending too much time on making the blog look nicer. Same as podcasting, what’s in the talk is definitely more important than how to listen to the talk.

First of all, a big “Happy 21st Birthday” to my housemate Megan! Because most friends are preparing for the oral test on Thursday (I’ve done mine today), we are going to celebrate for her on Friday night!

I clicked on her blog in my bloglines today. Apart from reading her interesting posts, I randomly looked at the subscribers’ number - “5″. It has been “1″ since I subscribed it last year and I know I am that only one. Not that her blog is not interesting, well, you can probably tell its popularity from the number of comments in her blog, but I guess most of her readers don’t use bloglines to subscribe it. Then I clicked on that number and there are three of them published their feeds. What surprised me is that three of them are Chinese, and they are also in the list of my Chinese blog’s subscribers.

I remember that I have mentioned Megan’s blog several times in my Chinese blog, and I think these three people followed the links to her blog and started subscribed her blog. Other than that I can’t think of any connections of this can happen.

This is interesting! I am pleased that I kind of built up a little readership and influences of my blogs. There are about 23 readers through feed, and about 100 visitors of my Chinese blog and about 200 to 300 page views everyday. That’s not much compare to other popular blogs, however, just for normal casual blogging it is already quite a satisfactions to me.

This is one of the reasons I like blogging and reading blogs, you can build up influences easily on the net without any complicated tools. Lots of people even published their books in their blogs. Many companies’ CEOs and directors also have blogs. By blogging certain limited news or events of companies, they managed to build up a closer relationship with customers and maybe attract more potential ones. For examples, when I saw these photos from Skype’s blog I wished I could work in a company like that in future. Also, blogging is good for company’s internal communication. I would like to read my boss’ blog if s/he has one and I think managers would like to their subordinates’ too.

PS. I went to apply a credit card today, because the yahoo domain is so cheap and I am thinking to get one to try a podcasting blog. More influences? Not, just want to have a try first. :-)