Note: This post is part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global (SMUG).
This may be a case in which our course sequence is out of order, since Blogging 109: Experimenting with WordPress.com should perhaps logically come before this one. In Blogging 109, I offer a chance for you to do practice posts on a Training Wheels Blog that isn’t your own. So you can feel free to experiment and make mistakes there, before starting your own blog.
But in another sense, it probably makes sense to at least start your blog here in Blogging 108, then go and experiment a bit in Training Wheels before coming back to start your own blogging in earnest.
As I describe on this page, which was my first effort to give a step-by-step intro to starting a blog on WordPress.com, the process is really simple. But I didn’t show exactly what it looks like as a first-time user, because the screen shots you see are from me starting a second blog, when I’m already logged in to my first one.
So now it’s time to update and enhance as part of the SMUG curriculum, and I’m making it a SMUG Podcast and putting it in the form of a Slideshare.net presentation.
Since everyone should have a blog, I’m going to start by creating a blog for my nine-year old son, John. Of course, I’ll need to start by getting a Gmail account for him. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the presentation:
Homework Assignments:
As indicated in the presentation, your homework assignments are as follows:
- Go to John’s blog and leave a comment on this post about what a great Dad he has. (And by the way, A Grand Start was really the title he chose for this post.)
- Start your own blog on WordPress.com.
It’s fine if you want to leave your blog in that initial condition for a few days. Send me an e-mail or a message through Facebook with the e-mail address you used in signing up for your WordPress.com blog, and I will add you as an author for the Training Wheels blog. Then you can experiment and learn how to do posts before you start doing it for real on your own blog.
