blogging question

[Richard Chonak]

On 02/10/2010 12:03 AM, Donna Halper wrote:
> My journalism students at Lesley University want to set up a news-blog.
>   I have no experience with setting up blogs-- I've commented on the
> blogs of friends of mine, but have no clue how one gets a blog started.
> I think I need something a little fancier than Blogger-- something where
> we can post pictures and video in addition to text. Do any of you know
> some companies that host blogs at a reasonable cost, where a neo-Luddite
> like myself could learn to set one up for my students?




Hi, Donna--

A lot of people host blogs at wordpress.com, and for a single blog 
that's probably a fine way to go.   They make it easy enough for non-IT 
specialists to do just fine with it.

WordPress can handle uploaded photos.  For video, I'd recommend that 
your students upload their files to a video-streaming site that's 
well-equipped to handle the storage requirements and the traffic, such 
as Vimeo or YouTube.   Once you've done that, it is easy to "embed" a 
video into a blog post by pasting in some appropriate HTML code.

If you need to host multiple blogs, it might become worthwhile at some 
point to run your own server; I host about a dozen blogs, using "Movable 
Type", another well-known blogging software program.  Movable Type is 
available for free for non-commercial uses, and the Linux server where I 
run it goes for $30/month.   You'd need somebody with Linux 
system-administration knowledge to install the software, set up the 
database where blog posts are stored, etc.

Hope this helps!

--RC