So how would one go about blogging?

Avoid hosting a neckbeard, as facial hair's a germ trap, :lol: and no expanding waistline, but I got opinions...

Also realized, after twenty years of being an hobbyist, I don't have much to showcase: modelling, painting and stripping, mostly stripping and not in a productive sort of way.:( Following some active blogs, I have noticed a motivational aspect to project completion in posting updates, with an organizational side effect, something definitely needed, as it's an hot mess. So how would one go about blogging? How much will it cost? What's reliable for image hosting? Any concerns about copyright or IP infringement, especially with background wallpapers - noticed images from WFB titles in many blogs' backgrounds? The last time I attempted something like this was around 1999/2000, with possibly GeoCities and either AOL or Earthlink dial-up and no idea what happened to it.

Basically, I'd like to emulate the cool kids, like Orlygg, Jaeckel, Mr. Eldritch Epistles...

Anyone know what font Saxon uses?

626_logo.jpg
 

Scalene

Member
I use Wordpress on site hosting that I pay for, however I think if I was starting now I would just use Blogger. The key advantage is that it allows better connection with other Bloggers and that is a key way of driving site traffic.

This is free, apart from the image hosting. I think people often use Photobucket, which used to be free but is just starting to charge. Basically anywhere that you can put an image will do.

Most people with a lot of GW stuff on their sites have some kind of disclaimer to indicate that no challenge is intended etc. I can't imagine there being much trouble about using images as part of a banner image collage etc. I've never heard of it happening, as long as you make it clear it's not official and it's not a commercial site.

Zhu would be the one to ask about fonts!
 
Blogger is easy to use and free.

For image hosting use Imgur, it is easy to use and reliable, also it is free.

The only concern about copyright or IP infringement I would imagine is if you start posting entire rulesets for games etc ...

No idea about the font Saxon use.
 

Suber

Member
I use Blogger too, it's pretty intuitive and allows me to keep track of other blogs in an easy way, which is important to keep me focused :grin: . About image hosting, I tend to use Tinypic, it usually works fine. Both of them are free and never got a problem with them :)
 

Chico

Member
I use Blogger as well, it's free and can be connected with all the other Google goodness like image hosting and G+.

As for image hosting I just use Bloggers inbuilt image software which again is linked to G+ for ease.
 

Plaiecivile

Member
I just started to use Blogger last Novembre, the basic features for me are more than enough to master right now, but I see all the potential if you decide to go in a bit of HTML editing. Also I went all in, using google drive as a platform to host my pictures and do 3rd party hosting, and google image to sort everything up.

So far so good!
 
Thanks. You guys are awesome!

Rather tepid towards paying for something amounting to a non commercial vanity project, though don't expect quality with anything offered for free. If Blogger is as good as claimed, then I'll reassess my impression and finally have an excuse to use Google+ for more than just email.

Thought I was close figuring out the font...

Is it Old English?
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
Yeah. Googles Blogger is the way forward.

The Saxon logo design is hand drawn lettering, It's got a lot of Art Nouveau references going on, which by the 1970s had heavily influence on the fantasy genre, maybe have a look at the typeface Arnold Boecklin (the original White Dwarf masthead, and John Normas Gor books) as a starting point.
 
I use blogger, it’s free and easy to use... though annoyingly they have stopped supporting their iPhone app since the latest iOS update. Another benefit is that it allows me to link with other blogs such as the mighty Suber and depraved Chico
 

alexbrown

Member
Iron Skeleton":3neqaavf said:
Blogger is easy to use and free.

For image hosting use Imgur, it is easy to use and reliable, also it is free.

The only concern about copyright or IP infringement I would imagine is if you start posting entire rulesets for games etc ...

No idea about the font Saxon use.

In my opinion, Blogger is more suitable when you are looking for a setting up simple blog, but if you want to create a professional blog, then you WordPress is the way to go. I've just finished setting up a blog by using a ready made wordpress template . It was pretty intuitive. I prefferred a premium theme but you can find a great free one!
 

Fimm McCool

Member
Legiocustodes":3mlp3b90 said:
Another benefit is that it allows me to link with other blogs such as the mighty Suber and depraved Chico

This is the primary reason for me choosing Blogger. My professional website is constructed through Wordpress as it's pretty easy to customise thoroughly but it doesn't have the connectivity between blogs that Blogger allows.
 

Gsain123

Member
There are many blogging sites which are free and easily available such as wordpress and blogger. These sites are very best option for start blogging.
 

alexbrown

Member
Wordpress is a good way to go. Being a designer, I'm in love with everything unique and eye-catching. From my own experience I know that an important part of a designing process is selecting the right typeface for a project (check out https://www.templatemonster.com/fonts.php ) . Btw, TemplateMonster also offers very cute templates, so you can use one for your blog.
 

Spooktalker

Member
IMO the blogosphere is a dismal post-apocalypse wasteland. I use blogger, and hate it. Google seems to have abandoned it a decade or more ago, and only tech-deprived communities like wargamers use it. :lol: If you just go along with the default skins and code and you look at the markup (ctrl-u in most browsers), it's enough to make a web designer cry. If you go trying to find an HTML5 minimal theme it's almost worse, with every contemporary theme throwing all this scripted hoohah that, when I encounter them in blogs as a viewer I just turn around and leave rather than wade through the nonsense to get to the content.

Google is moving backwards in terms of interoperability, and have killed the Picasa image gallery code running under blogger, with blogger the only exception. If you had picasa before, your galleries are dead except for the google content one. They killed the API and it broke my ability to load pictures through Lightroom, and I was so angry I stopped blogging between 2014 and 2017. My workflow went from pushing pictures, including metadata, directly from Lightroom to a new blog post in the click of a button to having to export a jpg file to my hardrive (previously jpgs of images didn't need to exist on my harddrive) and having to manually upload them to the blog post from within the blogger interface. Most here will tell me I'm overreacting, but I'm not. I rage every time I think about how backward and insular Google is.

They also strip metadata out of your pictures if they are loaded on Blogger. Not as completely as most, but any touching of it at all should earn all of our ire. If you aren't mad about this, you should be.

They also removed the ability for me to view my comments in a stream, and there is no comment feature in the app. In order to see new comments, I have to keep coming back and literally checking the blog post page of my blog posts. There is no way for me to see comments made to previous posts. If you turn on comment moderation so that you need to manually approve comments you can see them coming in in, but there is absolutely no other need to turn on moderation as we are not worth the spammers time to post spam to, and moderation is an awful chore. The lack of comment feature in the app is astounding. The ONE THING you want to in the app is check out the comments on your latest post while you are at the bus stop or waiting in line. No way to do it except browsing to your new blog post repeatedly.

Many gamers who know nothing about technology find it fine. Ignorance is bliss.

After ranting about things like this to a web designer friend (you guys got off with a super-abbreviated version while I am typing calmly and composed :twisted: ) he told me I deserve what I got and got what I paid for, and should use WordPress. I had a WordPress blog before, and if blogging is a big part of your life, it's ok. Not great, but highly customizable. I don't know how good the integration with Lightroom is, which is my #1 criterion. If you go with a hosted WordPress it might be easy to maintain. But if you need the full feature set and host it yourself, you need to keep the underlying third party products like PHP and MySQL up to date or you will be susceptible to attacks, and your blog might even suddenly stop working for obscure reasons. The latter happened to me several times. I was willing to do the upkeep when I was doing paid commissions but when I got a real job and the blog became a hobby the overhead was not worth it to me. Also, I didn't want to lose everything because I forgot to pay my hosting bill or forgot to maintain my domain. For these reasons, I switched to blogger.

The two "advantages" to Blogger are 1, 99% of our colleagues use it, so you are at a huge disadvantage in terms of gaining followers and being noticed if you don't use it too, and 2, it mostly just keeps going if you step away from the hobby for a six months or a year, and might even be there 10 years from now. Or Google might decide to pull the plug next week. The writing is on the wall based on how much they've invested in it, based on it still using the Picasa code, etc.

There are other serious problems with the blogosphere on the whole that I could fill pages with. There is no integration between the blogs and forums like this one, and the integration with social media such as twitter, tumblr, reddit and facebook is a sad joke. The blogosphere is a broken down tumbleweed ghost town, largely forgotten about. Read up on ideas like "transclusion" for daydreams about how the web might have worked, if it was built by visionaries.

The bottom line and where the rubber hits the road is that every step of blogging takes way, way more of your than it could if it was done right. It's a massive chore and difficult to integrate into one's life, even when posting less frequently than any other community would tolerate. It's a constant source of friction and years of searching has not yielded any means to grease the wheels. The sane part of my mind knows which way the cost-benefit scale is tipped, for the blog aspect as with most aspects of this hobby.

Depending on where you are on the technology scale, the answer might be just use Blogger, just use Blogger and prepare to suffer, or give up your dream and go home. :evil:
 

Kitsune

Member
I recently started one for gaming and used blogger. Mainly because the film review blog I've had for years is on Blogger (a mate set that one up) and I was kinda used to it.

The 100% lack of comments on said film blog, three years after starting is an achievement of its own kind, I reckon :lol:
 
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