Being in the IT industry, folks ask me a whole lot of computer questions, the most famous being "How do I get a website?", that question was asked most recently by a friend of Christine's sister. I liked the answer I gave so here it is:
I'm a huge believer in blogging now, it's a great way to interject your opinions, build a base, and throw your stuff at them (comics you write, pictures you take, etc, etc). I've noticed that they (blogs) seem to generate a whole lot more traffic that a normal website if you know what your doing.
That being in mind, let's go down the blogging route. If your friend is relatively computer illiterate, he or she can visit Blogger or LiveJournal and setup an account. A URL is given to the user and they can begin blogging automagically. I believe you can even tweak the blog a bit to colors/themes etc. Does the person have pictures? For God sake have them use Flickr, you can blog the pictures directly from Flickr quite easily (every picture has an option to "Blog This").
Now let's say your friend is computer literate, then there's a whole world of possibility (sticking with the blogging theme), they can use/install Movable Type, which is the software I use to blog on Monkey King's Domain. Or they can use Wordpress, the software I use for the Rose from the Ashes blog. Both of these are tremendously easy to install (trust me if I can figure it out most people can do it too). Or if that person is REALLY REALLY computer literate they can write their own blogging software (sort of), like what I did for Comic Book Review Machine. Now I won't mention the fact that all of the computer literate options will involve getting hosting somewhere, with PHP/CGI/MySQL access because a computer literate person should either A) know this or B) can figure it out when they can't install the software on their toaster.
This should get the person down the right path, but there's still a huge realm of possiblities for what can be done with/to their blog.
Posted by bkirsten at May 17, 2005 03:02 PM | |