Welcome to the second day of Blapril postings and with it comes a batch of new sign-ups to join in this process. I really should probably stop even jokingly referring to them as victims, because we really want this to be a joyful experience for all involved. At the time of writing this we are up to 38 members of this giant band of adventurers and I couldn’t be happier to share the journey. If you want to keep tabs on all of the new sign-ups I am intermittently updating the list that can be found on the Blaugust Media Kit page. I decided yesterday that this makes a lot more sense than trying to post a new list every single day.
Free as in Beer
Yesterday I talked at length about what I consider to be the most important step of creating a blog, which is figuring out what to call it. Today I am going to focus on carving out some real estate for you to hang out a shingle and start writing. Essentially you can divide your options into two clear camps, those that you are hosting yourself and those that you are having someone else host for you. Even that I guess is a little less than clear because technically if you rent server space and install your own site on it, you are technically getting someone else to host it. However for the sake of this discussion today I am going to focus on the options that are completely free and allow you to be writing within minutes of signing up.
WordPress
WordPress is effectively the 500 pound juggernaut in the blogging world. It is fast and easy to get signed up and comes with a pretty solid blog reader as well. If you manage multiple sites it also allows you to set up a scenario where you can manage and update all of them through a single interface. The negative however is that all of the freedom to be gained through using WordPress comes with the self hosted version which can be found at WordPress.org. WordPress.com is the turnkey solution that allows you to push all of the hassle onto someone else, but in order to get many of the features you might want it requires a paid plan. However in the free version you get a <yournamehere>.wordpress.com domain name and the ability to start posting instantly.
I’ve been a proponent of WordPress.com for years as a first blogging experience in part because you are going to out grow whatever first platform you start on. I personally started on Blogger and migrated to self hosted WordPress because I was limited in my ability to do the things I wanted to do. Knowing this the transition between WordPress.com to self hosting the software from WordPress.org is extremely smooth and there are lots of tools baked into the default software to ease this transition. I am a big fan of starting with the free version of WordPress because it is going to give you a lot of flexibility moving forward when you decide that your free site isn’t enough for your current tastes.
Blogger
Next up I introduce you to Blogger.com the blogging application hosted and maintained by Google. The nice bit about this tool is that if you are already a denizen of google, you can just pick up and start integrating with the various google tools immediately using an account you are already familiar logging into and is hopefully protected by two factor authentication. The negative for me at least is that it is hosted by Google and has essentially been in “maintenance mode” for years with the last features being added in 2017 and a bunch of things slowly deprecated and removed in 2019. The killer feature of this blogging platform is the way that it manages your blogroll, and this used to be even more killer when it integrated with Google Reader, which was unfortunately sunset in 2013 which was a dark time for the blogosphere.
The folks that love blogger really seem to love it, and like I said I started out my blogging life with a small blogger that will never see the light of day. What I found frustrating about it is that it seemed like I lacked the level of granular control that I personally wanted from a blogging experience. I think for others that is more of a positive because they ultimately place those design decisions in the hands of a limited selection of prebuilt themes and just get to the business of writing. My biggest concern is that Google loves to cancel its products, and I feel like they have been gunning for Blogger for quite some time originally trying to turn Google Plus into the new blogging platform. It has not happened but given that it does not seem that they are actively working on the platform, I am not sure that the future does not see this site closing down.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a strange platform but one that bears mentioning. It is among the most straightforward platforms for just getting in and writing about something and offers a lot of clean mobile options if you want to blog on the go. It is also an excellent platform if you want to do a picture blog or post your artwork, because it is very image forward in the way that people consume content. I personally find it a bit lacking when it comes to writing anything long form, and while I syndicate to the platform I think it does a generally horrible job at actually conveying my posts. I think Tumblr works best when you are wanting to use it like a Long form Instagram.
The main reason I bring it up however is its sheer simplicity and its wide adoption by a number of specific subcultures of the blogosphere (and fandom). Much of what was formerly the Live Journal community found its sea legs over on Tumblr, and if your voice is targeted towards one of those communities then you are going to find a lot of traction and support (as well as a fair amount of drama) on Tumblr. Other than just syndicating my blog with WordPress tools to Tumblr, the only time I really use it is to log in and look at interesting pictures. I use it mostly to look at comic art and other fandom art, and Ammo from AggroChat and the creator of most of the artwork you see adorning this blog has a great Tumblr. It is definitely an option worth exploring if your vision is extremely image heavy.
Medium
Based on my understanding, Medium was created by one of the twitter co-founders and started its life as a way of sharing a longer form post on the micro-blogging platform similar to TwitLonger but with more “bloggerly” sensibilities. What it has morphed into over the years is a pretty solid blogging platform that is more focused on sharing articles than sharing an entire website with the public. Its content aggregation platform is focused on the type of content being shared and less on the author, but this allows for more organic discovery of your posts so long as people are searching on one of the various things you have tagged on. You don’t so much have a “site” with its own name, but you do have the ability to link to your Author page and that then links to all of the posts you have written.
I include this as an option because it has a really good writing platform with a bunch of very nice features. The end result is a very pretty and legible article, but you have to accept that you have very little control over the look at feel of it. You can insert images, create headers and even create those little call out snippets to drive interest in the piece, but you won’t be able to change font and formatting or shift away from anything other than the stark black on white theme. If you just want to write however and want your ideas to percolate among other peers that you may or may not know about then this might be a platform for you. That said it is really hard to actually create a brand that is anything other than you as a person on a platform like medium.
Get in and Get Writing
I am sure as soon as I post this, folks will chime in about other options. I largely focused on what I consider to be the four easiest options for getting up and running and blogging this afternoon. All of the above have options for getting started in minutes, and if you are late starting with Blapril they can serve as a bit of a jumpstart into blogging. As I said before you are likely going to outgrow your very first attempt at blogging, and like talking about an escape clause yesterday, my personal choice is WordPress just for the flexibility and ease of migrating elsewhere. However all of the above can serve you nicely as you begin this journey.
Yesterday technically was the first day of the Blapril event, but traditionally I don’t really make posts on the weekend apart from advertising podcasts. As a result today is my first day of Blapril celebrations. For those who have not been reading regularly and are curious what the hell Blapril is, then I direct you to the original announcement post as it has all of the relevant links and such. Over the weekend a bunch of folks signed up and the numbers are looking a bit better than they were. So lets get the business type stuff out of the way and here is the updated participants list. If I were smart I would throw this on the media kit page or something so I don’t have to keep re-posting it every single day like I have in the past.
As of the time of writing this we have 33 Participants, which is pretty great for just something that got announced last week. I am always super thankful to the level of support that I get each time I venture forth into madness. Like so much of this blog is me talking to myself and a form of therapy, but it is heartening to know that I have this community that is willing to help out and support me whenever I need it. Since we are living in a time where you should tell the people you care about that you love them and do so often, I am telling all of you in the Blaugust and now Blapril community that I love you dearly for your willingness to go down this rabbit hole each year.
The Most Important Decision
Now we get to the heart of today’s post. When you are thinking about starting a blog, you are confronted with so many different decisions that need to be made. It is very easy to go about this in the wrong order and start by setting up a website and going through the nuts and bolts of technically creating the blog. However of all of the decisions that you are going to be asked there is one that rises to the top of the heap. You need to know what to name your en devour because at least on some level this will ultimately dictate the type of audience you draw in from that point forward. Without maybe meaning to, your name is broadcasting a lot of things to people who come across in in a list of blogs or hopefully in organic google search results.
It goes so much further than just naming a thing however, you also need to make sure that you have a clear runway for whatever vision you are creating. Social Media right or wrong is inexplicably linked to blogging, and unless you have been around since a time before Twitter you are going to likely need an account on that platform as well as pretty much everything else that might someday rise to the realm of broad social relevance. So in choosing your name you not only want to try and pick something that you can easily get a meaningful domain name for, but also a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, an Instagram, a Twitch account or anything else that happens to become important at a later date. There is a reason why I am an early adopter of social media platforms, it isn’t necessarily because I LOVE social media… it is because I am effectively planting my flag in the ground and claiming a chunk of real estate for future usage.
Similarly you are not always going to get there first. So for me when I can’t get Belghast on whatever platform I am targeting I go for BelghastStern which is my consolation prize. So I think it is equally important to put some thought into your escape clause for when you can’t get your brand on a specific platform. I loathe the word “Brand” but sometimes you have to call things what they are because you are effectively building a brand for your blog, something that will ultimately make it recognizable and stand out from the crowd.
I Did This All Wrong
I’ve written a version of this post so many times now, but effectively I consider myself to have failed miserably at branding. Tales of the Aggronaut is so rarely what my blog is actually called. It is called Aggronaut.com or Belghast’s Blog by the vast majority of my readers or when someone from the media talks about it. Belghast is a brand that seemingly has worked because “it me” and I have landed on a name that is relatively uncommon. Tales of the Aggronaut was a thought experiment that served its purpose well until that purpose was no longer what I wanted to be writing about. Aggronaut was at the time what I thought to be a clever name for one who navigates or explores Aggro, aka the threat we are all trying to hold while tanking in an MMORPG.
So since this blog started it’s life as most specifically a Warrior tanking blog for World of Warcraft, the name made a lot of sense. However “Aggro” has another context, as someone who is aggressive or one who is being angered. I like to think I am a fairly chill and even keel sort of person, and in that context the name doesn’t really fit the sort of content that I create. We doubled down making it even worse when we started a podcast loosely connected to this blog and decided to call it AggroChat. Again the name gives the absolute wrong impression about the sort of content you are going to be consuming, but we stuck with it because this blog’s name was already established.
The name you choose will ultimately live with you for the life of your blog and will shape and dictate how people interact with it. Fortunately for me… Belghast became the bigger brand and while I should have probably gone with Belghast.com or Belgha.st but at the time of creating this blog I didn’t realize I would be the key factor in the equation. Coincidentally I own both of those addresses because like I said above I took the time to stake out that real estate for if I ever wanted to change my mind at a later date. There is part of you that needs to be thinking through all of the possible things that might impact you and coming up with a bit of a plan of how to deal with it. For every Ello that turns out to be nothing there is going to be an Instagram that ultimately blows up.
Your Exit Strategy
I’ve talked about this before, but I think it is extremely important to give yourself a way to shift things up as you yourself change as a person and as a writer. On April 17th, this blog will be 11 years old and during the last decade I have changed a lot as a person and most definitely as a writer. Like I said this blog started as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, something that I felt deep passion for at the time. While I am back in game right now, the last time I had played Retail WoW prior to that was November of 2018. Your tastes will change and with it you need to give yourself a way to change the blog to fit your new tastes without burning down all of your work and traction you have made in both the community and in google’s search engine nonsense.
I’ve pivoted a bunch of times throughout the course of this blog’s history, because while I don’t exactly think my name is great it is fairly non-descriptive and is not specifically focused on a particular game. This allowed me to stay a float and relevant until I finally reached the point where I became the brand and this thing I do just became another bit of data associated with it. You are going to outgrow whatever name you create for yourself. You are going to outgrow it more quickly however if you focus on being too specific. The best blog names are fairly general and can be highly malleable to fit whatever the writer wants to be talking about.
I’ve always particularly liked Wilhelm’s “The Ancient Gaming Noob” because it is evocative without actually pinning the writer down to it being a blog about a specific thing. Similarly I’ve always like names like Bhagpuss’s “Inventory Full” because it speaks to a conundrum that every gamer is familiar with and again allows for so much room to pivot freely between subjects. Another great name is Roger and his “Contains Moderate Peril“, because while sure it sounds “gamey” it absolutely does not have to be because so many things we engage with have a bit of peril in them. The idea being that all three of those names are memorable but have the sort of wiggle room in them that allows the author to shift them to what they need to be at that moment.
Check Availability
As I said before, it is important that you can adapt the brand you are building towards a bunch of different platforms. When coming up with a new name, make sure that someone else that you don’t want to be associated with is not already using it on the internet. You also do not want to go down the road of ending up with a copyright fight on your hands, so make sure it isn’t actually used in anything that could bring forth legal woes. Next see if the a domain is available, because even if you start on one of the free services with WordPress.com or Blogger.com, it is likely at some point that you may want to register a proper domain name. Lastly run down through the various social media services and see if you can get this name you are crafting or some reasonable facsimile at least.
Once you have found a name that resonates on all of the levels I have talked about today, then you probably do have something that will stand the test of time. Then you go about actually creating the site and getting it up and running. The name will serve as a guidepost as you create a logo, choose a theme, pick a color scheme, and all of the other assorted tasks that come with setting up a website for the first time. However all of this said… it isn’t the end of the world if you wind up with a name that doesn’t exactly suit your tastes years down the line. I have survived with what I feel is a lousy name for a blog just fine.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Grace, Nephsys, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have special guest Nephsys who was hanging out with us on voice chat before the show and we didn’t want to lock her out in the cold when we all popped into the podcasting channel. This week was one of those weeks when we did not think we had much to talk about, but ultimately filled a show anyways. Up first is some discussion of Stellaris and the weekly pick up game that appears to be happening in lieu of in person board game night. There is much discussion about the vast changes that happened over the course of the games lifespan. From there we talk a bit about a love letter to Mega Man Battle Network that is called One Step from Eden. Then after that discussion Bel completely loses his place in the list of topics and goes off into an impromptu discussion of Animal Crossing thinking he needs to fill air time. Finally he sorts things out again and returns to some talk about Dragalia Lost and its recent updates before closing out the show.
I thought I would start off this mornings post with a picture of one of my coworkers sleeping on the job. The cats are still confused as hell as to why we never leave the house and go to work. The funny bit about this is that Kenzie and Josie tend to hang out with me in my office during the day and Mollie the skittish cat hangs with my wife when she is downstairs. This has actually been pretty great for Mollie since she is actually getting time to play and be cat like without being freaked about the other two being around. Usually Josie sleeps up behind one of my monitors as shown and Kenzie sleeps on an old PC Case box that is sitting beside me that she adopted at one point and now as a result I cannot get rid of it.
As far as our well being goes, we are doing pretty good. We have been in limiting outside trips for a few weeks now and both my wife and I are at home for the foreseeable future. I’m working remotely and as a teacher she has not reported back from spring break yet with that whole situation sorta being up in the air as to how it is going to work. We still have quite a bit of food and plenty of other assorted products, but I figure at some point over the weekend we are going to have to either make a trip out to a grocery store or luck out and get an order in on one of the grocery pick up sites. We got our first order like that on Monday and were a little frustrated that they didn’t attempt any substitution of items. For example we ordered a specific type of butter just because you had… which they apparently were sold out of but they had other salted butters that eventually my wife went and picked up.
All in all we are doing pretty well, which is not meant to tempt fate but more just to give a general status update. The world around us however is not doing so hot. The Governor made a declaration that any non-essential business is to remain closed, which effectively means if you are not involved in food cycle or involved with critical infrastructure like hospitals then you are effectively closed. For a long while the part that was disturbing about this is how I knew things were getting bad but the world didn’t seem to reflect that yet. It reminded me of being in a Zombie Apocalypse movie but one where everyone tries to pretend that the Zombies aren’t actually a thing. However since the most recent order the world does in fact look changed, and everyone sorta seems to eye every other human being with suspicion.
Other than having trouble with a frame of reference for what day of the week it is, I am doing fairly well with social isolation. Given my druthers I would spend all of my time at home anyways, so giving me a reason to do so doesn’t seem to be impacting me nearly as much as it is some of my friends. I am also super lucky in that I get along well with my spouse and we are more or less treating this like one long extended weekend. Because she has a better immune system than I do, she has been the person to go out in public for the majority of the needed trips. However I did make a trip to the local comic shop that was closing for twenty one days as per the order so I could settle out my pull box and make sure she went into the lock-down with some additional funds.
As far as Blapril our moved up running of the Blaugust festivities… we have quite a few signed up and ready to participate with still a bit of time to get new folks signed up. As of the time of writing this post we have twenty three, which is down a bit from our normal Blaugust runs. However last Blaugust was among the lowest as far as participation goes, so we might just be in a bit of a blogging slump. I did also completely spring this thing onto the community without much warning, but hopefully as we get started more folks will show up and chime in. Here is the list of participants so far.
Regardless of numbers we will have a good time going through the process that Blaugust is. It will serve as a delightful distraction to the things we are going through on a day to day basis.
