I thought I'd take a few minutes to do one of those "what's behind the scenes" posts -- the back-end of blogging so to speak. Some folks may find it interesting.

To start with the bottom line of blogging, none of this matters all that much when it comes down to attracting readership. Some of the most popular blogs out there are still on plain-vanilla, free, Blogger accounts with default templates (the template is the layout and look of the blog). While there are other roads to attracting an audience, such as starting six years ago or catching the attention of a major blogger who links to you often, it is really about the content. The blogosphere is an at least decent meritocracy, and there is no crying in blogging. If you're not getting as many readers as you think you deserve, the mirror is the only place to go to cast blame.

Anyway, I like the "roll your own" solution: I register all my domain names with GoDaddy. GoDaddy is inexpensive and the interface is efficient to work with. Once you're sure about your domain, be sure to buy up the various other permutations of the name you've chosen (the .net and the .org versions). You'll regret it later if someone else buys one up (trust me) and the cost is minor. Buy common misspellings, too (trust me on this as well). You then point any other domains you own to your main .com location. This all holds whether you're blogging or using the web for any other purpose.

Once you buy a domain name, you need hosting. Again, you can go with blogging services like Blogger (free) or TypePad (pay) if you don't want to know from nuts and bolts and want to get straight to the content creation business. I like to have more power than that, and the option to use my web account for a variety of purposes if I want to.

Right now I'm with HostGator and can recommend them. I'm using their third tier, Swamp plan. This gives you much more bang for the buck than dedicated blog-only hosting. You get plenty of disk space and bandwidth, as well as lots of other features like mailing lists, decent stats, the ability to host multiple domain names on one account, cron jobs, lots of MySQL databases, software (including blogging software) that can be automatically installed, IMAP email, and more...

Do not use GoDaddy for hosting. Their interface is annoying and convoluted and the things you can do with the account are seriously dumbed-down. I also used to use a hosting service used by many of the "big blogs" because they seemed to have a good reputation...I'll refrain from naming names, but avoid them as well. There are a lot of good, big hosts that give you much more for less and still have good service. I recommend that you look at what you get for your money, Google around and make sure the host is used by a lot of people and isn't a fly by night and go for it. Again, I recommend HostGator, but there are many others. Don't get put off by a few bad reviews, or claims of "overselling" here and there. Only a small percentage of satisfied people ever bother saying they're satisfied, while people with an ax to grind tend to make more noise than their numbers.

Once you have hosting, you can use that one account for all of your domain names, hosting photos...whatever.

For blogging software I use MovableType. I started briefly with Greymatter, but as it was not really being supported and seemed to be dead end, I very quickly shifted to the much more full-featured MT. MT used to be the blogging platform, but when SixApart went to paid licenses for MT it lost a lot of its market share to WordPress, an open-source solution. Each one has its partisans. I considered moving to WP when I saw the MT community drying up, but at the time I had so much invested in the look and feel here that I didn't want to spend time on the switch. WP also requires more knowledge of PHP to customize -- something I didn't have any knowledge of at the time. If there's one thing I like to avoid, it's learning curves.

I'm happy to have stayed with MT and don't hesitate to recommend it. The community is coming back, and the new version of MT, MT 4, is now rapidly going through release candidates and looks to be a major step forward. They have rebuilt from the ground-up and are also going back to open source.

Both MT and WP install fairly easily. While knowledge of HTML is helpful, it's not absolutely necessary if you don't want to do much customizing. You can install the software and go straight to blogging, and there are pre-made styles out there that non-programmers can install (MT comes with several).

This blog is currently running on MT 3.34 with a highly customized set of templates. For the geeks, it uses divs now rather than tables, which allows for much more customization -- theoretically I could shift the contents all over the place and change the entire look of the site if I offered multiple style sheets. I finally, last night, figured out how to center the blog on the page. FYI, I added this into my stylesheet under body:

position:absolute;
left:50%;
margin-left:-500px;
[Correction, that wasn't working properly. Nixed for the moment -- see comments.]

Even though you don't have to, a little HTML knowledge can go a long way. I have a severely dog-eared older edition of this book on my shelf in front of the computer: HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)

My photographs are mostly taken with an older version of this Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7K 7.2MP Digital Camera. I like it because most cameras in its price range only have a 3x zoom. The 6x zoom makes a big difference and the image stabilization works well enough to take good pictures even when zoomed all the way in. Batteries rather than a built-in charge are good as well (keep extras on hand). It takes very nice pictures and the video is OK.

I use Pinnacle Studio Plus for video editing and Adobe Photoshop for photo editing.

What else? OK, here are my system specs for posting on hardware forums:

Case: Antec P-180
Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel
Video: EVGA 640-P2-N825-AR GeForce 8800GTS 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SUPERCLOCKED
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775
Memory: Patriot eXtreme Performance 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
PSU: Antec NeoPower NeoHE 550 ATX12V 550W
Cooling: ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
Burner: Memorex 18x DL DVD+/-RW
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Music
Monitor: ViewSonic VX2025WM 20.1" Widescreen LCD

Questions, discussion? Feel free.

Update: BTW, I layout everything by viewing it in Firefox. I strongly recommend Firefox over Internet Explorer. Firefox is easier to program for (it has fewer issues with html and css not working as they are designed to) and it has oodles of free expansions I couldn't live without. It has nothing to do with Gates-hate. FF is really a superior product.