Blogging and Your Career
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on the basics of blogging at Career Transition for Dancers, a non-profit that offers career counseling, scholarships and workshops in New York and Los Angeles for dancers transitioning out of careers as performers. It recently occurred to me some of the readers of this blog may be interested in blogging themselves, so I thought I would share my presentation here.
This was my first time giving such a presentation and I spent much of the time answering questions. For all of the hype surrounding blogging (including coming from me!) it was good to discuss the tangible pros, cons, ins, and outs of blogging. Sometimes the time commitment is intimidating while the actual technical options of maintaining a blog can be overwhelming. Even now, I am considering taking the leap into self hosting but am a little hesitant about my
web skills.
I’d like to use this space for a conversation on blogging including tips, ideas, and questions. And as always, feel free to email me!
Self-hosting hasn’t been too much of an issue for me because I still use free WordPress templates for my websites. The user interface is the same as with WP.com templates, so no transition.
The only thing I didn’t do was to install the templates myself. That I had a friend do because I was too unsure. Even after he did, though, I was able to go through the template user guides and enable widgets on my own. The user guides I used told me which directory to download to (via FTP), then the WP admin pages have a “Widgets” page where you actually enable the widgets.
I also did edit the stylesheets for my sites by hand… I felt like I had a strong enough command of HTML to at least figure out what parts of the CSS I had to take out. (Plus there are certain features of my templates that the user guide walks through, so I got to know what CSS looked like from there.) I would cut/paste the line(s) of text into Notepad, then save the stylesheet (again within the WP admin page)… if it worked, then cool. If not, I could paste the code back in.
I hope that did not confuse you even worse!
I have liked self-hosting. Most of all if you can find a friend or coworker who knows WordPress or Drupal and can spend some time showing you how, that can be best!
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