Free blog sites

[Redoctober]

Hello - early next year we will be looking to break ground and get our self build underway. Some members may recall we are re-locating to the Scottish Borders and as a result leaving behind friends and family, well, the odd one or two maybe 

Anyway, I would like to keep them  up to date with progress and thought an ideal way would be via a free Blog site. Does anyone have any suggestions as to the best site to use. The criteria being is has to be free and simple to use. 

Your thoughts welcome. PW.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Wordpress is easy to use, but I'd fork out the small annual fee for a domain name and set up wordpress on that.  easy to to, as all the main hosts provide a wordpress set up, and it frees you from dependence on something that could close down at any time.  My hosting fees are just a few pounds a year, and I can both back up my blog easily and keep a local copy for testing things out.  AFAIK, none of the free blog sites offer and easy or free backup service, so having control of the whole LAMP stack running on your hosted server space, being able to FTP files in and out easily and being able to backup and change things carefully makes a paid for package worthwhile.  It also means you can host your email on the same domain, so having a neater email address, or addresses.

[SteamyTea]

I think that wix.com have blogging, you would have to check.

Biggest problem with the free sites is the amount of space they give you for nothing, and any adds of course.

It is pretty cheap to set up your own website. 

Edited November 14, 2017 by SteamyTea

[Ferdinand]

For this purpose I would suggest free Wordpress i.e. Wordpress.com. Second best would be Blogger. I think the differing policies on allowing ads - WP  No Blogger Yes - do not matter here since you will make about thruppenceer year.

 

I would stick with a free one for this project because it will stay up in the future as a record for you and your family without a continuing need to pay some money every year.

 

If you were to want eg redoctobersdacha.com as a domain while you are actually building then you can have that while still using the free Wordpress, and you would pay £3 per month, and you would get free support and Wordpress advertising removed. Then after the domain falls away you would I think still keep the free Wordpress site address.

https://wordpress.com/pricing/

 

Construction blogs are technically simple, so you do not need the extra facilities of standalone Wordpress imo.

 

 When you post an article get into the habit of posting to an update thread on Bh to let us know.

 

Ferdinand

 

 

 

Edited November 14, 2017 by Ferdinand

[ProDave]

Another vote for wordpress. Look at my blog (in my signature) that's a standard off the peg wordpress blog.

 

I chose the house name, partly because a reasonable domain name to match was available.

[Stones]

You could always blog here on BH!

[TerryE]

6 hours ago, Redoctober said:

and thought an ideal way would be via a free Blog site

 

There's no such thing as free in this life.  "Free" in this case means that you pay no annual or monthly fee but there will either be scraping of your content or ad placement on your viewing. 

 

Lots of service providers provide budget hosting services at a low annual cost that avoid this crap.  For example I use Hear Internet for my personal website and mail domain.  They are UK-based and do a basic entry service for ~£30 p.a. which would do what you want (though I use their Home Pro offering with costs ~£100 pa.)  but there are lots of alternatives around this ballpark.  I suggest that you stick to EMEA-hosted services so at least you know that they have to conform to current data protection legislation.

[ToughButterCup]

@Redoctober, you have five  decisions to make.

• Hosting 
• Volume of information you want to publish
• Blog platform
• Data security
• Domain name

Hosting: you can disappear under the weight of guff written. Answer the next three questions and then decide the host

Volume: text only, but video and photos hosted elsewhere (YT Vimeo FB} ? Or everything on your space? Video eats space, images too

Platform: WordPress, but look at the smaller ones

Security: EMEA

Domain: purchase your own, or do you mind being part of a subdomain? ( redodoctober.wordpress )

 

Cheap, cheerful: sub domain at wordpress.

Balanced cost with security, look at @TerryE or @JSHarris or @ProDave 's example.

 

Once you get one you'll want to add bells and whistles. 

[Ferdinand]

Worth a note that you can usually import and export blog posts between platforms en masse, but there may be a few nips and tucks needed.

 

So eg you could start on say Wordpress.com and move self-hosted.

 

But you are obviously well-organised so may want to plan in advance.

[Redoctober]

9 hours ago, Stones said:

You could always blog here on BH!

 

Thanks @Stones - I already do so and will continue to do so, but family and friends would require slightly different content to what I would disclose on this site. Different agendas. I'm sure my dear mum wouldn't be interested in the depth of my utility trench!

 

Thanks also to others for their thoughts and suggestions, I will set about researching the above.

 

PW.

 

[Ferdinand]

Of course she'll be interested!

 

Mine is - she says "That's interesting, dear" in exactly the same tone used to discuss earwigs and spiders with the very young Ferdinand.

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I started off with near-zero knowledge about this, but was spurred into having to do something when Ebuild went down, taking a lot of the most useful blog content with it (all the attachments and photos were made inaccessible when it was made read-only).  Like an idiot, it hadn't occurred to me to make a back up..........

 

There followed a fairly frantic few days where I and a few here who kindly helped me out managed to scrape most of the content from the Ebuild server, although it was incomplete, because there were only broken links to the photos and attachments.  I then rebuilt every blog entry, one by one, as a set of documents, with the attachments and photos as links to where they were locally stored (and backed up). 

 

I was very firmly convinced that the only way to keep things safe was to go for a paid for hosted service.  I chose Fasthosts, for no other reason than they were already looking after my domain registration and providing me with a handful of email accounts on that domain.  I wasn't using the web space associated with that domain name at all, it was just sitting idle.  I had no idea as to how to use Wordpress, or set it up on a server, but managed to get it running locally on my own PC after a bit of playing around.  This was a nice and safe way to experiement, as if it all went horribly wrong I could just delete it and start again, without having to deal with something on a remote server somewhere.  There are some good guides for doing this on the web, and if using Windows there is a package available that allows you to fairly easily set up a local environment that behave like a remote server.

 

After playing around for a time, and transferring my old blog documents to Wordpress blog entries OK, I felt reasonably comfortable with transferring these across to a bit of paid for webspace (not expensive, I think I paid around another ten pounds a year on top of the email hosting and domain name renewal fees I was already paying for.

 

Then this forum came to life, and the blog function was activated, so to help kick start things here I but my own blog on hold for a while and copied everything across to here.  Sadly I ended up getting some abuse and ended up locked out of that blog when I took a break from posting here for personal reasons, associated with stress (and I wasn't the only founder member to take a break at this time, either, setting this place up and building a house was tough for a time).  For reasons I to this day don't fully understand, I ended up getting some abuse and effectively being locked out of the blog here when I returned, so I then had no real  choice but to get on and go back to the original plan, of putting everything on my own web space using Wordpress.

 

That turned out to be very easy, as the hosting company have an automatic set up option that does practically everythign for you.  All you need to do is choose a theme and write (or copy) the content across.  You also need to remember to back it up, as blogs hosted on any webspace, anywhere, are not backed up for you as a rule.  There are some easy to use back up tools available in for Wordpress, and generally they do a basic back up to your home PC, or some other storage, OK, but none of them seem that comprehensive.  Havig had two experiences where I risked losing control of content I'd written (and I can't access or edit my blog here, as it's locked, for example, and a lot of it is now out of date, where I've edited errors in the live version and added some new content over the past year).

 

I've become a bit paranoid, and have spent more time learning how to make a full backup.  I now have an exact mirror of my blog running here at home on a Raspberry Pi, plus the same Raspberry Pi has incremental back ups of everything on the hosted server, taken every night, just to be safe.  Once a week I copy the latest back up to another hard drive as insurance, too!

 

Based on my unfortunate experiences, I'd probably avoid the "free" Wordpress, Blogspot etc offerings and opt to pay a small fee to host your own website.  Not only can you run multiple blogs for different family members, but you can also use it for file storage.  I keep a few handy files stored on mine, that I can access using FTP from pretty much anywhere.  It's not ultra secure, but none of the files are sensitive, they are things like calculation utilities I've written, that are handy to access easily, a bit like some of those I've added as downloads to the top of my blog front page, for others to download and use.

 

 

[ToughButterCup]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

I started off with near-zero knowledge about this, [...]

Based on my unfortunate experiences, I'd probably avoid the "free" Wordpress, Blogspot etc offerings and opt to pay a small fee to host your own website. 

[...]

 

That's the top and bottom of it.

[daiking]

Coming back to this, if I just want to anonymously vent my spleen (NOT in a way that will get me arrested), not convey any sort of useful information, I should just sign up to Wordpress? 

Edited September 21, 2018 by daiking

[Ferdinand]

I would say either Wordpress or Blogger would meet the need.

 

If you are going to do it in a serious or pointed manner or on serious subjects, then being with somebody in the USA is probably important, which is the case with both of the above.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited September 21, 2018 by Ferdinand

[Triassic]

On 15/11/2017 at 08:02, Ferdinand said:

Of course she'll be interested!

 

Mine is - she says "That's interesting, dear" in exactly the same tone used to discuss earwigs and spiders with the very young Ferdinand.

 

 

I’m her eyes you and very young Ferdinand are probably about the same age!

[daiking]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand said:

I would say either Wordpress or Blogger would meet the need.

 

If you are going to do it in a serious or pointed manner or on serious subjects, then being with somebody in the USA is probably important, which is the case with both of the above.

 

Ferdinand

 

 

As if...

[suniil]

Blogger, I'd say. Everything is free with a multitude of features. Plenty of themes and skins. 

 

If you use Google photos, attaching pictures & videos are just one click away from the moment you take a photo or video with your phone. You also will have better ranking in search index depends on how you integrate into webmaster tools, author profile (google plus).