A blog is like an online diary or journal, where you type entries and people can read them. A blog site is designed to be easily updated regularly. There are various ways to set up a blog, here are a few, I have listen them in order of simplicity…

1. Go to http://blogger.com

Advantages: Very easy: Sign in. Start a blog. A true blog. Invite others to post if you want them to. People can make comments. Add pictures.
Disadvantages: Probably the only disadvantage is that you can’t dramatically change the layout of the blog or integfrate it into an existing website. It sits on it’s own. You can choose different themes.

See an example here.

2. Get a .mac account and use iweb.

Advantages: Very easy. You can have it as part of your website. Easy to change the appearance. Easy to add photos. Just as easy to add podcasts.

Disadvantages: Only 1 author. No comments, (except with a hack – icomment). It is actually a web page makign program that looks liek it makes a blog, not a real traditional blog in the sense that a blog resides totally on a server, you can post from anywhere, it generates the pages on the fly as people ask for them. Hence the ability to have multiple authors, comments etc.

See an example here.

3. Use WordPress.

Get a program like WordPress but to do this you need a server. ie you need to be paying for a website to be hosted somewhere that has php and mysql. It takes 5 min to set up if you know what you are doing, (I set one up last week in 5 min). It takes about 5-10 hours if it’s your first time (I know from experience!).

Advantages: Flexible. Anything you want it to do, it can do. Thousands of add-ons. Fully customisable. Multiple authors. Can even embed in existing websites.

Disadvantages. Hard work to set up.
See an example here.

Get Blogging!!!

To submit your site to google go to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add your web address, then wait a couple of days.

do the same for yahoo, msn etc

To see if google already knows about your site type site:http://www.yoursitename in google search

If you want your page to go up in the search results, you need to have other people link to your site from their site.

To see how many sites link to your site type link:http://www.yoursitename in google search.

The more entries here, the higher you will be in the search result, basically that’s a simplified version of how it works.

NOTE: This article is for iWeb 08 and earlier.  Click here for how to do this in iWeb 09.

SUMMARY: iweb normally publishes your website to your .mac account. But it also has an option in the file menu called ‘publish to folder’ which means it saves the entire website onto your computer. (It puts it in your user directory in a folder called ‘sites’)  To publish the site you then have to manually copy  your site  to the web with an ftp program so that others can see it. That information may be all you were after, but if you need step by step instructions on how to do that, read on!

Before you go any further, can I say the apple way of doing things is good and simple, so get a .mac account if you can.  Otherwise, here goes…

1. You need to find out some technical sounding things from you ISP or web provider before you progress. Don’t be scared off by the funny names. They are actually quite simple. These are the details of where your webpage will be stored.

You will need 4 things.

FIRSTLY, the address of the ‘ftp server’ for where you want to put your website. If your website is ‘dubbo.org’ then it will be something like ftp.dubbo.org.

SECONDLY you will have a username and password with it.

FINALLY will also have what we call a ‘directory‘ which is simply the place your files will be stored on the website and it will be something like this: ‘/public_html’

You will need to know all these 4 things before you proceed. It’s no use guessing them. If you don’t know them you need to ring ask your web provider who you are paying for your web hosting what these details are. In summary you need (1) ftp server address, (2) username, (3) password and (4) remote directory (or remote folder).

2. Download w2w. This seems to be the easiest way to do it. It’s here: http://www.wallner.nu/fredrik/software/w2w/ With instructions.

3. Make and edit your website in iweb. In iweb select ‘publish to folder’ and it will save your iweb site into your user/sites directory on your computer.

4. Run w2w and it will copy the website from your user/sites directory on your own computer to you website on the internet. When you run w2w you will see a window like this:

Name can be anything.

Folder is the folder on your home computer. Hit Browse and go to your Macintosh HD/Users/Yourname/Sites/iwebsitetopublish and click on open.

The last 4 settings are the settings we talked about above from your ISP.

Fill them all in and press upload. From then on it remembers your settings for next time.

5. Each time you want to update your webpage, just repeat steps 3 and 4.

That’s it!