With all the buzz Twitter receives in the tech world, I assumed that everyone had heard of it and that I was a relatively late adopter. (I created a personal account in December 2008, and I created a TechKathy account in January 2009.) And while it has taken me a few weeks to understand what all the fuss is about, I have to confess that I’ve grown to like the service.

In a word, Twitter is “microblogging.” What does that mean? If you think of blogging as writing about your thoughts, feelings, activities, secret crushes and other things on your own personal site, then imagine Twitter as a miniature version of this. You get your own page (mine is http://twitter.com/techkathy), and you write about whatever you want in 140 characters or less. How much is that really? Here’s a post I wrote that’s exactly 140 characters:

I made my first animated gif using a cool Twitter logo I found thru Smashing Magazine. My new gif is now at the bottom of www.techkathy.com.

Obviously, you’re not going to tell your life story in 140 characters. Twitter tells you to just answer the question, “What are you doing?” One thing I really like about Twitter is that only people who actually WANT to know what you’re doing will see your Twitter posts. When you join Twitter, the site prompts you to find friends to follow so you see their posts, and it allows others to choose to follow you. You’re never spamming people with your posts, and you’re not getting spammed either—what you see or don’t see is completely up to you.

I have chosen to follow tech writers like David Pogue and Gina Trapani and tech-related organizations like Macworld and WordPress, so most of what I see on my Twitter homepage is tech-related news.

Most of what I write and post on Twitter is also tech-related. When I first joined Twitter, I started out writing rather mundane things, but it recently dawned on me that I could use the service to provide additional small tech tips to people as I discover them. My tips are usually for websites and services that I’ve found useful that I may or may not have time to write a full blog post about. You can see my tips, and all my Twitter posts, without having to join by visiting http://twitter.com/techkathy. If you do decide to join and choose to follow me, you’ll get my posts delivered to your Twitter homepage automatically.

If this all sounds interesting and you want to learn more, please check out this two-and-a-half-minute introductory video from the Common Craft:

And for still more on Twitter, here are a few articles:

• Twitter Tips for Beginners, by David Pogue,
• What is Twitter?, by BBC Panoramic, and
• How to Use Twitter Like a Pro, by Sean Tibbitts, (a response to Pogue’s article).

As always, thanks for reading my blog, and happy tweeting!

Copyright © 2009, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.

Have you ever thought about starting a blog? It may seem like a daunting task, but it can be a really fun project. To begin, you just need an interesting topic to discuss or a niche to fill and a few ideas for blog posts. But once you’ve got a clear idea of your blog’s purpose, and you’re ready to start, where should you create your blog? There are a dizzying array of sites out there vying for your blogging business!

If you’re just starting out, you’ll likely want to find a free or low-cost blogging service that hosts your site for you. That’s what I did for my first blog (my personal site, Life in Amsterdam). These services are great because they don’t require much (if any) knowledge of HTML coding or any special software, they offer a number of great features and add-ons, and they can produce surprisingly professional-looking results. Plus, free and low-cost blogging services are a great way to try out the blogging medium without much financial commitment.

If you already have some experience blogging and making websites, or if you’re just ambitious, you may want to consider hosting your site yourself. Hosting your own site means that you either literally host it yourself on a computer you own and maintain everything yourself or pay for a hosting service (like BlueHost or DreamHost) and upload your site to their servers. For the purposes of this article, however, I’m going to discuss using the free and low-cost blogging services.

Before I started blogging, I thought a lot about what I wanted my personal site to look like, and I tried out nine different services in October and November 2008 to see which best fit my needs. My list included two paid options, Squarespace and TypePad, and seven free options: Blog.com, Blogger, FreeWebs, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Vox and WordPress.com. The two paid options offered free trial accounts, so I set up accounts will all nine. (I feel I should mention that while many of these services do offer expanded features for a fee, I did not pay for any extras during my “research period.”) Setting up blogs with all these services and examining their features was a surprising amount of work, but I did learn a great deal by doing it, and you may want to do a similar sort of trial run for yourself.

For my personal site, Life in Amsterdam, I set up some basic criteria. My blog service would need to: allow me to post text, photos and videos; offer me a good selection of themes to choose from; provide me with at least 1 GB of storage space and 1 GB of bandwidth (per month); track the number of visitors and page views my site received; integrate with other sites like Flickr and Delicious; and be easy to work with and customizable. I also didn’t really want ads placed on my site, but I was willing to be flexible, since I knew I was demanding a lot of my free host. Here’s how the seven free services stacked up: (All of the services allowed me to post the content I wanted, so I won’t mention that in each section.)

Blog.com met some, but not all, of my criteria. It offered 1 GB of storage space and 2 GBs of bandwidth per month, and it included site statistics (though not very detailed). Blog.com did not place ads on my site, but it would allow me to place them there to make money, if I liked. However, Blog.com did not integrate with other sites, and while it had a decent number of themes, none of them really grabbed me. On top of that, I didn’t like the dashboard (the control panel for the blog) and user interface.

Blogger is associated with Google, so if you have a Google account, you can use your username and password to create your blog. Blogger met more of my criteria: it had a pretty good choice of themes; it offered unlimited storage and bandwidth; Blogger gave me the option to install Google Analytics (a Google application for tracking site traffic); it could integrate with almost any service I wanted; and it was relatively easy to operate. After a few hours, I had a nice blog to show, and it didn’t force ads onto it.

FreeWebs was a mixed bag for me. I really liked the blog I created, but I had to fight with the site at times to get it the way I wanted. FreeWebs did meet most of my criteria though: it had a great selection of themes, it was customizable, it offered traffic statistics, and it gave me the option to have ads (to earn some money) or to keep them off my site. FreeWebs gave me 25 GBs of bandwidth per month (far more than my minimum), but it only gave me 750 MBs of storage space. That, combined with the difficulties I found in customizing the site, pushed it down a bit on my list of contenders.

LiveJournal didn’t really work for me. It offered a nice selection of themes, and it was pretty easy to work with, but it limited the way I could customize my site. It offered 2 GBs of storage space, but I couldn’t find a clear answer about how much bandwidth per month I would receive. It allowed me to post links to other sites, but it didn’t allow me to really integrate with them through widgets (small gadgets usually in the sidebar or at the bottom of a website that provide content from another site, utilities like weather forecasts or other bits of information). It also did not provide any site statistics, and it forced banner ads onto my pages.

Tumblr offered only a few themes to choose from, but it also offered the option to create your own theme and customize it. It offered site statistics through Google Analytics, and it didn’t force any ads onto my site. However, I found it a bit difficult to work with, as I couldn’t customize my page without diving into the code, and I couldn’t find any published information regarding the amount of storage space or bandwidth that was allotted to my site. I think Tumblr may be a great free blogging service if you have knowledge of HTML and/or you want extra control over your site, but I felt like it was more work than I wanted to commit to for my first site.

Vox had some of the coolest themes I found on a free service, it was easy to work with, and I also had the ability to embed a variety of widgets on my pages. However, Vox inserted banner and text-based ads onto my site, it didn’t offer site statistics, and it didn’t tell me how much space or bandwidth my site could use.

WordPress.com offered me a good selection of themes, a lot of options to customize my site, widgets to display my content from other sites, basic site statistics, 3 GBs of storage space and unlimited bandwidth. The only downside I found with WordPress.com was their policy of placing ads on sites; however, the ads were small, and I could pay a fee to keep my site ad free.

As I mentioned earlier, I also tried out two services that would charge fees for my blogs after my two-week trial periods expired. These two services were similar in design to the free services, as I created and managed all of my content using their online user interface (as opposed to using software offline or a separate content management system and uploading my content to a server). Here are my findings for them, using the same criteria I listed above, with the fees listed in US dollars:

Squarespace charged $8 per month (or $86.40, if I paid for a year up front) for the basic account service. This basic service met some of my criteria: I received 1 GB of storage space and 75 GBs per month of bandwidth, no ads were placed on my site, and Squarespace offered detailed site statistics. But I didn’t really like the themes Squarespace offered, I couldn’t post widgets to my site (I could only have a links page), and I didn’t find the service all that simple. There were tons of options to customize things, but that made editing my site take longer when compared to the other services, and I found the many editing options a bit overwhelming.

TypePad charged $14.95 per month (or $149.50, if I paid for a year in advance) for their pro service. I used the pro service for my comparison, since it was the lowest priced plan that offered 1 GB of storage space. The pro plan with TypePad offered 10 GBs per month of bandwidth, it was easy to work with, it offered a decent array of themes that I could customize a bit, it offered site statistics, it integrated well with other sites using widgets, and I wasn’t forced to have ads on my site, although I could choose to place them there to make money.

So now that I’ve completely overwhelmed you with all these details, I’ll try to sum things up a bit. I ended up choosing WordPress.com to host my personal site. (You can see my Life in Amsterdam site on WordPress.com here: http://kathykeating.wordpress.com/.) I just really liked WordPress.com—it was easy to use and gave me plenty of ways to personalize my site.

If I had been willing to invest more time in creating my site, or if I could remember more of what I once learned about HTML, I might have chosen Tumblr. Other sites I saw on Tumblr appeared to load quickly and have a great deal of content on them (alleviating some of my worries about the lack of information on storage space and bandwidth).

And if I hadn’t have found WordPress.com, I probably would have chosen Blogger for my site. Blogger met all my criteria, and I enjoyed working with it too. But I have to confess that one of my main reasons for choosing WordPress.com was that it had a couple themes I liked better than my favorite Blogger theme.

As you may now realize, I think choosing a blogging service is rather subjective. I tried to be thorough, but I know that I was often swayed by attractive visual themes and ease of use. And I think it’s actually ok to be this way. You’re the one who has to use the service regularly, so if you find a few that meet your bottom line, why shouldn’t you choose the one with the best themes or the best user interface—or both, if you’re lucky?

The best thing I learned from all this research is that it’s possible to have a professional-looking blog, that’s easy for you to use and easy for visitors to navigate, that’s absolutely free. I think that’s great news for everyone!

I hope this article has helped you learn about some of the more popular blogging services available. If you have any comments or recommendations for blogging services you really like, please post a comment below to let everyone know. And if you do decide to start a blog, best of luck to you!

Copyright © 2009, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.

Last Friday night, I tried to take a look at this site – not because I had done too much with it yet, but just because I was happy with the way it was taking shape. I had installed my WordPress.org content management system, and I had loaded my lovely website theme onto the site earlier in the week. That night however, I was stunned to find that when I typed in www.techkathy.com, my site no longer loaded. Instead, I was rerouted to some German guy’s website devoted to new developments for the iPhone.

I was shocked, upset, angry and confused, all at the same time, but I slowly pulled myself together to take action. Unfortunately, since this is my first website, I wasn’t exactly sure what that action should be. I struggled for the next four hours to figure out how this had happened and what I could do about it.

Now rather than tell you about my frustrating experience along with a few of the errors I made,  I thought it would be far better to share with you some of the lessons I learned from all this:

- Lesson 1: Never keep the default passwords your website host or content management system set up for you. Once you receive passwords, log into each respective account and change the passwords. The fewer people who know your passwords the better! I thought that because they were randomly generated passwords, they were secure. Maybe they were, but others may have had access to them.

- Lesson 2: Always transfer your files between your computer and your host’s servers securely. The default option set up for me was “FTP,” which works just fine, but it doesn’t encrypt any data – including usernames and passwords! Everything you send and receive is readily available to anyone who might want to see it. There are far more secure methods of transferring files between your computer and your host’s servers, including “SFTP” (Secure File Transfer Protocol) and “FTPS” (File Transfer Protocol over a Secure Sockets Layer). Both encrypt your data; and, fortunately, it’s not necessary to know too many of the details about this – most hosts offer all of these options and most FTP software applications allow you to just pick one of these options when you establish a connection to your server.

- Lesson 3: Always back up all your content. I had only just started the website, but I had already posted an “About” section, telling people about me and the purpose of the site, and I lost it. Luckily, my husband was able to recover it from the browser cache, so I didn’t have to rewrite it all, but I should have kept a copy of it on my computer.

- Lesson 4: If your site is attacked, alert your host immediately. This was in my host’s documentation, so I did it right away. They offered a few pieces of advice (although it didn’t actually fix the problem), but it did give me some guidance on where to start looking for problems.

- Lesson 5: If your site is attacked, keep a log of what you do to fix it. I wanted to fix the problem right away, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly it was, so I just took down the entire site, which included many files that looked unfamiliar to me. It didn’t help that I was upset and somewhat unsure about what I was doing. Later I found out that some of the files were supposed to be there. Since I kept track of what I had done, I was able to look back at what I had done and know how and where to put them back. It was also helpful because when I asked someone else for help identifying what went wrong, I had something I could show that said exactly when the problems started, what I had done, and when I had done it.

Of course, this is not a comprehensive list of how to keep your website secure nor is it a guide for what you should do if and when your site is hacked. These are just a few of the lessons I learned from my experience. Now, I actually consider myself lucky that this happened when it did. I could have lost much more of my content and had a much harder time getting the site back up and running, if it had happened later.

If, like me, you’ve learned a few pointers you’d like to share with others about keeping your website and its content secure, please feel free to post a comment here about it. Thanks, and best of luck with your own websites!

Copyright © 2008, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.