Transcript: Blogging (Part 15): Tools to help you get started

Posted on December 8th, 2011 by Sacha Chua

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the last chunk!

Holly Tse: We probably have under three minutes left. We’ve got one more question here from Carla, and it seems like the most appropriate question to end this. She’s asking, “What recommendations would you give on which blogging tools to get started easily?”

Sacha Chua: Whichever you find easiest. For most people, that’s either wordpress.com or blogger.com, or something like that. WordPress.com or blogger.com. The tools don’t really matter as much as the attitude and the ideas you bring to it. Some tools make it easier to post than others. Things like Tumblr or Posterous are also gaining in popularity. But what you really want to do is get into the habit of thinking, “What do I want to share? What do I want to learn?” Then you almost can’t help finding tools that fit the way that you work. That’s the main thing.

HT: WordPress or Blogger, but really, whatever works. Whatever works for you.

SC: I think the much more important thing there is the habit of saying, “Well, what do I want to learn? What can I share? What’s different about today? What do I want to remember?” That’s probably the best tool recommendation I can make – that mental tool of asking yourself those questions. Then writing–even if it’s boring, even if you feel awkward and gangly like a high school student trying to figure out what to put in an essay–write for yourself, and you’ll gradually figure things out.

HT: Yes. Very good. It’s not just about the technology. It’s about why you are blogging.

SC: It’s almost never about the technology. If there’s anything I can do to help you get started with that, get in touch with me. I’m @sachac on Twitter. You can follow the link from there to get to my blog if you want to, and you can leave comments on that too.

HT: Thank you very much for joining us this evening. I want to say to everyone who is listening to us or catching the audio replay (which is available for 48 hours after the broadcast), Sacha’s so enthusiastic about blogging, she convinced me to start blogging again, so… Yay! Congratulations Sacha!

SC: And this is where you repeat your blog URL so that everyone can check it out.

HT: Yes, so it’s hollytse.com – I have to spell it out, I have one of those names too – hollytse.com.

SC: I look forward to finding out about all these wonderful blogs… The blogs that you, dear listeners, are going to start or continue… I’d love to learn from you and your experiences too. We’re all figuring things out. No one’s a real expert, and we’re all going to learn from each other’s stories.

HT: Okay, great! Thank you so much! I hope everyone has a good evening and we’ll connect in the blogspace.

SC: Have fun!

HT: Thank you. Good night!

Tada! You can find this 15-part series at Discovering Yourself through Blogging, including a text and PDF version.

More posts about: blogging, tips, writing // 1 Comment »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/22472

http://franklinchen.com/ Franklin Chen

I agree that the technology is not the most important thing, but for me it was important to a degree. This year, I kept on delaying launching my new blog because I wanted to figure out whether to use Blogger or WordPress or whatnot, and kept on reading reviews and worrying about features and drawbacks. I had an old Blogger blog that I gave up because I felt legitimately hampered when posting to it. It was a big hassle (for me) to lay things out the way I wanted, to insert images, computer code fragments, etc. In the end, I lucked out and Octopress came to the rescue, a geek-oriented blogging system that I could just write posts for with Emacs and statically generate and customize with full control, and this system has been working great for me. So I think technology may matter, depending on what you want to be sharing and how you operate.

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