Tired of waiting for the next Savage Minds post? Start your own blog! I’ve been reluctant to recommend any free blogging service in the past. Most of them are difficult to figure out. The most popular, Blogger, is not particularly user friendly, and Typepad isn’t free. However, for one of my classes I have been testing out WordPress.com. This is by the same people who make the software which runs Savage Minds, and it is a breeze to get started. Just register and your off and running with a new blog in seconds. It is as easy as using your web based e-mail account.
Start your own blog, write an anthropology related post, and let us know here in the comments. Some of you are practically blogging already in our comments section, so why not start your own blog? The more anthropologists are blogging, the more we will have to write about on Savage Minds! What are you waiting for?
I have to say that I don’t find Blogger particularly difficult to deal with. I have minimal html skills, and no web design training, but I managed to put something together. Blogger doesn’t support trackbacks, which is a little annoying, but other than that, its pretty adequate.
Check out my running discussion of heritage, archaeology and culture in de-industrialized Baltimore at http://www.hampdenheritage.blogspot.com.
I am going to use Typepad for a limited-access blog in the near future. It seems to be the only way easy platform for setting up permissions.
Have you tried wordpress.com? The whole point is that you don’t need to even know what HTML is! Most people don’t.
I say this as someone who has helped such people set up blogs on various systems. In most cases they get stuck fairly early on in the process, but most people I’ve set up with WordPress.com get off and running without any trouble – even setting up their own links on the sidebar which is remarkably difficult for such users to do in Blogger.
WordPress.com is an excellent service, and it beats Blogger because it provides a way to categorize your posts , trackback your sources, and keep a blogroll or link section… plus you can have about me, contact me, etc pages that are literally plug and chug features. That and the WYSIWYG text editor, it becomes as easy to use as a word processor like Microsoft Word.
Thanks Kerim, for making this kind of PSA. The anthropology community definately needs to get more active on the blogging front, in my opinion. Hopefully this will motivate some to blog anthro.
Interesting…I registered at wordpress just to look around. I didnt even know they hosted their blogs. When did this happen? And no ads on the blogs? What’s the catch?
I used to use blogger.com for my personal blog. Nothing special and I was getting tired of the spam and lack of nice templates, but then they spruced it up a little bit and it’s not that bad anymore…seems a bit more stable now too.
While not strictly an anthro blog, Daniel Varisco has a blog on the Middle East at http://www.tabsir.net; he is an anthropologist who worked in Yemen, and is currently past-President of the Middle East section of the AAA.
Adrian uses wordpress for his students’ blogs. He several times reported on heavy spam troubles, not without documenting solutions, though.
Orange:
There is a difference between WordPress the software and WordPress.com the hosted solution. I was talking about the latter, which has very good Spam protection. In fact, Akismet was developed for the hosted service.
aah, I yet wondered you did not mention the necessity to have own serverspace. Thx. You see I m a complete tech-n00b.
Hello all,
I’ve read Savage Minds and Anthroblogs for quite sometime, so after seeing this post and talking to Will I decided to start my own. You can view it at Synthesis of Thought I admit that it is off to a slow start and it’s not very pretty yet- but, I will be blogging from the SFAA conference in Toronto next week.
Jen,
Look forward to reading your reports!
I’m not sure why my last post says “Toronto” but I did mean to write “Vancouver”. I swear, my laptop has a mind of its own some days.
And here is mine: Erkan’s Field Diary: http://frazer.rice.edu/~erkan/blog/. I don’t know; maybe because of what I study or because of my journalistic fantasies it does not look like a proper blog but it had gained some following and I am satisfied with that so far.
I just hesitated between wordpress and dotclear and i finaly choosed Dotclear..i’m waiting for Dotclear 2 who has a interactive spam solution. Dotclear 2 also use akismet 😉