It's been a while since my last installment, but I'm glad I waited. A lot has happened in the online world and a couple of new and better services have popped up of what I'm about to talk about next. Setting up your own blog, without owning a computer!

Choices of Blogging Sites

Most people that run blogs run their own sites and have to set up the blogging software and maintain the database and generally screw around with a bunch of stuff that costs (too much) money. But there are now a couple of websites out there that do all of that for you.

There are a ton of sites out there where you can set up a blog, some you have to pay for and some you don't. They all have different pros and cons and some are good and some are really bad. The great thing about these is that you don't have to worry about maintaining the server or upgrading the software. The blog service does all of that for you. If this is your first blog or you don't have money to burn, you'll want to go with a blog service.

There are really two free blogging sites that I'm going to talk about: blogger.com and wordpress.com.

Blogging For Dollars

Blogger.com is a site run by Google and is a very popular blog service. It's big selling point is that it's easy. Seriously, if you want easy, sign up with blogger.com. With blogger.com, you basically create a login account, create a blog (you can have more than one blog per account) and pick a fancy template that defines how your blog will look. Easy as that.

If you decided to create a blog called, say, TuberTop, then the address to get to your site will be http://TuberTop.blogspot.com/. If you ever see any blog with blogspot.com in the address, you know it's a blogger blog. Blogger.com blogs also have an ugly looking toolbar thing at the top that you can't get rid of. This is one of the prices you pay for using this service. But the ease of use may just outweight this inconvenience for you.

Another nice feature of Blogger.com is that it's tied in with Google's other sites. If you use GMail or Google Calendar, you can use your Google login to get into your blogger.com account. That makes it even easier!

Blogger.com is also tied into Google's AdSense service, letting you make a little coin off your blog if it proves to be popular enough. If you want an easy way to put advertising on your blog, nothing's easier than integrating with the King of Online Advertising.

So, when you think easy blogging, think Blogger.com.

Example

Does It Make Word Juice?

Wordpress.com is the other blogging site I wanted to talk about. It's not easy, but like a M1A2 Abrams main battle tank, it is powerful. Wordpress.com let's you set up your own template and let's you change it and mangle it all you want. That might be good or bad, depending on your mangling skills.

Wordpress.com also doesn't have a toolbar at the top of all of it's pages. If it wasn't for the address (your TuberTop blog would now be TuberTop.wordpress.com) and a small blurb at the bottom of the page, you wouldn't even know it was a Wordpress.com blog.

Wordpress.com also has a wide array of plugins that add functionality to your blog. These are things like adding advertising to your site, adding a random quote to your pages, or adding a shopping cart. These are usually written by users and then shared with the whole community, so you can really get a lot of functionality. But they can sometimes conflict with each other too, causing problems that you then need to straighten out. Also, not easy.

If you want something powerful or want to tweak your blogging software to suit you, Wordpress.com is where it's at.

Example

How to Eat Fried Blog

If you're starting your blog just for fun or for your friends, you can skip this and go straight on to blogging. If you're blogging to get a message out there or to attract an audience, read on.

The art of blogging is a complicated one and one I won't act like I've perfected. But I think there are a couple of general rules for attracting a loyal following.

Have a Focus

If you really want to gather an audience that will read your blog regularly, you need your blog to focus on a certain topic. A corollary to this is that you shouldn't be the topic. If you try to post about everything you're interested in, no one is going to be able to follow it.

When I read an article I really like, say one about how to organise a desk (I'm easily entertained), I usually try to follow that blog for a little while to see what's next. I'm expecting that the blog will have more articles on that topic that I was interested in. If there's a couple more posts and it's about stuff that I don't care about, say the antics of the person's cat or something else totally unrelated to organizing, I'll stop following. And I would say that this is true of most people. So if you want to attract and keep an audience, stick to a central topic of interest. You will eventually attract a crowd centered around that topic that will keep coming back for more.

Successful topics people have chosen are: Parental tips and tricks, Lazy management techniques, Software development, Wacky business ideas and many, many more.

Seriously, you can pick anything, but be sure to pick a topic that really, really interests you, because you're going to need to...

Post Often

Another thing about following a blog is that you want to see regular updates, or it's just not worth coming back. If someone hasn't posted in three months, I'll usually stop tracking them. If you don't post regularly, you will lose your audience (trust me).

There will be circumstances in life that cut into your blogging time, like the birth of your daughter for instance, but be sure to pick it back up once the chance arises again. It's never to late to get back into it.

An oft cited number for how often you should post is usually twice a week. I think once a week is fine, if you've got in depth information to post about. If you post shorter articles, posting more often is better to get the same amount of information out to your readers.

It's also good to post often to get Google to visit your site more and will help you get indexed in the search engines so people searching on your topic can find you. The more often the page changes, the more Google likes it.

Posting often doesn't mean you should skimp on the content. So be sure to...

Post Original Content

It's okay to link to other articles in other blogs based on your topic, but be sure to add to the conversation. Otherwise, you're not adding anything that your readers couldn't get elsewhere. The best of both worlds is to link to another article and then add your unique take.

If you link to another article, that can create what's called a "trackback" on their blog. This allows readers of that article to find your article about that post. Adding original content in your article is the best way to hook those readers to coming back to your blog again for future articles you might write. So, it is important to discuss other people's blog posts on your blog, but be sure to add your unique perspective on the article.

Conclusion

I think that's all I've got for now. Be sure to return when I talk about how best to follow other blogs and how people will typically follow yours.

You can find all the sites I've talked about, and more, over at my Del.icio.us lifelectric tag.

And be sure to check out all the other Life Electric posts. It's computing without a computer!

In preparation for part 3 of Living the Life Electric, I did some looking around at different online bookmarking services. I personally use del.icio.us, but I had heard a lot of good things about Furl and Spurl. In the end, I decided to go with my old stand by of del.icio.us, but feel free to look at Furl and Spurl as well. The following should be easily adaptable to all three.

Can't Stand Losin' You

When we're out and about on the Internet, there are times when we stumble onto a website that we just know we're going to want to go to again. It could be an online forum that we want to keep up with or a blog that is particularly interesting (like mine perhaps?) It could be a good news site or game page. Whatever it is, we know that if we forget about it, we'll be kicking ourselves later.

This is where bookmarks come in. A bookmark is a way to save the URL of a website so that you can get back to it later. This is extremely useful whenever you want to get back to a webpage you've been to before. You can always hope a Google search will help you get back, but having an actual link to the page will make you're life that much easier.

Mmmm... Bookmarks

One big problem with traveling from computer to computer to do all of your online surfing is that you can't take stuff with you. This is especially true with bookmarks. Online bookmarks are basically saving a shortcut to a website and are traditionally stored in the computer's web browser. But, any bookmarks we save on one computer won't be there when we get on the next computer. Sure, we could use our handy-dandy email account to send ourselves emails of websites that we like, but that will get extremely unwieldy after a while. And so coming to our rescue is the online bookmarking service, del.icio.us. Yum.

First, a warning. Del.icio.us is ugly. It's useful, but it's so ugly, it must have fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Don't be perturbed by the ugly. Del.icio.us is our friend.

If you go to the del.icio.us homepage, there will be a link there where you can register. Now that you have an email address, you can sign up using that. So register and fill out all the information it needs.

After you sign up, you will have chosen a username. This can be anything you want it to be, but you should probably choose the same name as your email account. If not, that's okay too, but you'll need to remember what it was.

Now that we have an empty del.icio.us account, let's start filling it up.

Remember Me

Let's run through a little tutorial to see how del.icio.us works. We'll start by bookmarking this site (Don't worry. If you don't like me, you can delete it later).

So the first thing we want to do is to copy the URL. The URL is going to be the address that shows up in browser in a little text box at the top and starts with http://. Highlight that whole line and copy it.

Now, open up a new browser window (or tab) and go to http://del.icio.us/[your username] where [your username] is the del.icio.us username that you selected when you registered. This will take you to your very own del.icio.us page. Up at the top of this page, select the link that says 'post'. Paste the URL into the text box and hit 'save'.

You'll now be taken to a page where you'll fill in the details of the link. In the description, type what the name of the link is. For this example, type 'Living the Life Electric: Part 3'. You can leave the Extended field blank, but it's there for your notes on the link, like 'Great tutorial that I couldn't live without', or something equally flattering. But the tags line is where we'll work our magic.

Tag Reflex

A tag in del.icio.us is a way for you to easily find a bookmark after you have about 100 of them saved. By tagging bookmarks with simple keywords, you can filter through all of the clutter to find exactly what you're looking for. Another great thing about del.icio.us is that you can look at everyone else's tags too, kind of like a collaborative treasure hunt. You can think of tags as categories, so you're really putting each bookmark into a certain set of categories that will help you find them later.

For our current example, let's put 'tutorial web bookmarks' in the tag field. this will place our bookmark into the tutorial, web, and bookmarks categories. In del.icio.us, all tags are separated by spaces, so if you want to create a category for Grandma Ida, you'll want the tag to be called 'GrandmaIda', not 'Grandma Ida'.

After you hit save here, you'll actually be taken to the page that you bookmarked. This is del.icio.us's way of helping you out, whether you wanted it to or not. If you go back to del.icio.us's homepage, you'll be able to get to your bookmarks again by going to the Bookmarks link at the top of the page. You'll see now that you have one link saved and the tags you created on the right hand side. As you get more of them, you'll be able to click on them to bring up links that are only in that tag category.

Share and Share Alike

Now that we've added to the pool, let's look at what everyone else is bookmarking.

You can look at a certain user's bookmarks by going to http://del.icio.us/[thier username]. For example, http://del.icio.us/firstclown will get you to my links.

You can look at what links are in my tags by just adding a tag to the end of the link. http://del.icio.us/firstclown/lifeelectric will get you all of my links tagged lifeelectric and http://del.icio.us/firstclown/computer+linux will get all of my links tagged with both linux and computer. You can combine multiple tags with a + in the url. http://del.icio.us/firstclown/library+unread+book will get you books that I want to read from my local library.

You can also browse tags from every user using del.icio.us. http://del.icio.us/tag/breeder will get you everything tagged breeder and http://del.icio.us/tag/band+punk will get you punk rock bands. Try some of your own and see what you get. Always remember to try variations on your theme. If a tag of 'breeder' doesn't get you what you want, try 'breeding' or just 'breed'. You never know what someone will name their tag, so try everything you can think of. Sometimes people will spell things wrong too, so a search for geneology might bring up things that a search on http://del.icio.us/tag/geneology might not.

At the bottom of every page, there is a 'popular' link. This will show you the links that are bookmarked the most for a given tag. Here are the most popular links for the 'genealogy' tag. Pretty cool? You betcha.

Now, whenever you're at a computer, you can go to your del.icio.us site and look up your bookmarks. And you only have to log in when you want to save a bookmark.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of Living the Life Electric.

I am assuming in Part 2 that you have already gone out and gotten your Gmail email account. Some of the things discussed here will be Gmail specific, but should apply to all the free email providers. I'm also assuming you have already read Part 1 of our series.

Now that we have our email address, let's talk about how useful it really is.

Home, Sweet Home

If your email is your virtual address, it's also your virtual home, because, like a real home, it's where you will keep all your stuff. Your email account will be used for three main purposes. The first is, well, as an email address.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

The main use for an email address is to communicate with others on the internet. If you've never written an email message, you can think of it like writing a normal letter. If you need to practice, open up your email account in another browser window and follow along.

First, you have to address it. The email address you are sending the email to will go into the To: field on the email. You can actually send an email to multiple people by seperating email addresses with commas. For instance: nancy@aol.com,tommy@gmail.com,betty@earthlink.net. This will send the exact same email message to all three of the email addresses.

Often times, newer computer users will mistype an email address and wonder why emails are not getting to their expected destination. Here are a couple of rules to follow to make sure you have the email address correct:

1. There are no spaces in an email address. Ever. If you see on someone's website that their email is nancy @ aol.com, remove the spaces from the email before sending. Sometimes people will do this on the web in order to prevent spam. Remove all spaces before sending.
2. There's always an @ in every email. If you're missing the @, your email will not get sent.
3. Every email address does NOT end in .com. You can email me at lifeelectric @ firstclown.us. If you send it to lifeelectric @ firstclown.us.com, I will not get the email. So pay attention to the last part of the email.
4. There is always a . something at the end of every email address. It might not be a .com, but it will be something. Common ones are .net .gov .edu .us or, of course, .com.

Playing Telephone With Emails

One problem that crops up often is that people who don't have computers get email addresses from other people verbally. Sometimes you get an email online or off a business card nice and spelled out, but getting an email address over the phone can be very difficult for the uninitiated. Here are some rules to follow, along with the above rules about emails, to successfully get an email address from someone verbally.

Say someone tells you their email address is "Katie Beal at Kent dot E D U". How can you figure out what their actual email address is? Follow the following rules.

1. First, remember that there are no spaces in email addresses. that means the first part of the email, "Katie Beal", is probably 'katiebeal'. It could also be 'katie.beal' though, so you should ask to make sure. Usually people will say "Katie dot Beal" if they mean 'katie.beal', but you should always ask to make sure.
2. When she says "at Kent" what she means is '@kent' . The little @ is called an 'at sign' and when someone says "at" in an email address, that's what they mean. So far, we know her email address is 'katiebeal@kent'. But remember, it's got to have a dot something at the end so...
3. The "dot E D U" is meant to be '.edu'. The edu extention on an email address means that the address is for a College, in this case Kent State University. Add it to the end and her email address is 'katiebeal@kent.edu'. Simple.

There are other things to watch out for, too. If someone says "dash" they mean '-'. If someone says "underscore", they mean '_'. Practice on the following phone to email conversions. Mouse over the text to see the answer.

• Life Electric at First Clown dot U S
• Mike dot Walsky at N L S dot E D dot Gov
• Vice dot President at White House dot Gov
• Wacky dash Monkey at Earth Link dot Net

Awn Righting Whell

Now that the To: address is filled in, you're ready to write your message.

The first thing you'll fill in is the Subject:. The Subject is what will tell your pen pal what your email message is about. If you're writing about something specific, put a good general topic sentance in your Subject, like "About the Tomoatoes" or "Aliens Invading Now!". If the email message was a newspaper article, the Subject would be the headline. Make it something descriptive so that the person receiving your email message knows that they want to read it.

And finally, the meat of the email, the Body. The Body of the email will contain the main message you're writing. Write it like a normal letter, and this part will be easy.

When you're done and you've double checked to make sure you typed everything in right, hit the send button on the top and little gnomes will take your message across the galaxy and drop it into the mail box of whomever it was addressed to. Okay, there's no gnomes, but you don't need to worry about that part anyway.

A message will usually take about 5 seconds to 10 minutes to get to the other person. It will sometimes get lost and take a couple of hours, but usually, your message will arrive pretty quickly. That doesn't mean that everyone will respond back as quickly. I, for instance, only check my email in the evenings and sometimes can't respond to an email for a couple of days. Just know that the other person will respond back when they can, and that's the most you can hope for.

If you get the message back in your Inbox and it says something like, "Email Delivery Failed", that means you have the email address wrong. Double check the email address you sent it to and try sending it again. That email message will be in your Sent Mail folder and you'll be able to forward it on or copy and paste the message into a new email.

Your Little Black Book

Speaking of getting email addresses, your email account is also where you will keep your email contact list, like an electrionic Rolodex. If you click on Contacts, you will be taken to your list of email address contacts. It's important that you keep your friends' email addresses in here, because the Gmail interface will look here to help you with sending email messages.

Go ahead and add a person and email address to the contact list. After they are added, you can go and Compose a new email message. When you type into the To: field, a drop down list will show all of the current contacts that match. For instance, if Katie Beal is in my contact list and I want to write her a new message, all I have to do is type Beal in the To: field, and her email will appear, without me having to remember it. This feature will save you a lot of time and headaches down the road, so use the contact list.

That's Where I Keep All My Stuff

Since we're talking about using the internet without a computer, another extremely useful way to use an email account is as storage for files you want to keep.

Let's imagine you're surfing the IRS site, you know, for fun, and you run across a document you just must have. It happens to be a PDF document that you want to download and actually keep. The problem is, if you save it to the computer, you'll be breaking one of the rules in Part 1. If you save it to the computer, you aren't really keeping it because you might not get this computer next time anyway. How can you save it so that you know that next time you're at a computer, you can get it back?

Now that you have an email account, you can save it there! Here's how you do it.

1. Save the document to the computer. It is very important that you remember where you saved it. You will need it later.

   WARNING: This might not be possible on all computers. Some public access computers don't allow saving of files. If you're at one of these, you're going to be out of luck. Usually the only way to find out if you are at one of these computers is to try.

2. Compose a new message and address it, in the To: field, to yourself. Put something descriptive in the Subject, like "IRS Document IM5342345GT534".
3. Now you're going to add an Attachment. This will allow you to attach a file to an email message and sent it to someone, in this case, yourself. Click on the 'Attach a file' link and then click the Browse button. It will bring up a little box that will let you find your file on the computer. This is why you need to remember where you saved it.
4. Now send the message and you're done. It may take a while to send, because it has to upload such a big message, but give it time and you'll soon have your file in your Inbox.

If you need to find it later, just search for "IRS" in the search box at the top and you'll have it. A link to the file will usually be in the message. Just click it and it's yours.

Next time, I'll talk a little about surfing the web and keeping track of bookmarks from computer to computer.

I've been thinking lately about the concept of living an online life without actually owning a computer. Is there really a digital divide if computers are freely accessable from libraries and local cafes? There are usually restrictions on these public computers, but how much do they really prevent someone from experiencing the virtual world of the internet?

Can you participate in the online community without actually ever owning a computer?

I think the answer is yes, and in this series of articles, I'm going to illustrate how.

Intro

Everyone knows that you can go to the local library, jump on a computer, surf around and search on Google. There's lots of information out there that is both useful, informative, and fun. But this is only one small part of the Internet. This is a passive use of an amazing communications tool. It is akin to using the telephone to listen and not talk. What makes the Internet so great is that we can add our own knowledge to the primordial ooze of pure knowledge. It is a truely democratic society where everyone's voice can be heard. What many of us want, is to become a part of this new medium.

The key to becoming an online citizen, however, is to have what is considered an "online presence". Much like the girlfriend putting stuffed animals around the apartment in order to stake out territory, you need to leave signs that you actually live in this online community and have your voice be heard. Through this series of articles, I hope to illustrate how that can be accomplished.

Ground Rules

First, let me lay down some ground rules that you will need to follow if using public access computers:

1. Never check the little boxes that say, "Remember my login". Since you're on a public computer, anyone who gets on this computer after you will be able to access all of your information. That is no good. To be extra careful, logout of all your sites and close the browser when you're done.
2. Don't download files to the computer and then leave them there. Later, I will show you how to handle files you want to keep, but downloading them to the computer and then leaving them there will allow the next person to come along and view them. Remember to delete any files you've downloaded when you're done with the computer.
3. Pick a good password and don't let people look over you're shoulder when you type it in. This sounds a little paranoid, but it happens sometimes. Also, a good password doesn't mean one that's hard to remember. This is a good password: 'best7grey'. It's good because it's non-guessable and easy to remember. So you don't have to write it down. Just don't use your dog's name, please.

The Keymaster

In order to get the full benefit of being online, you must have a single point of contact. You must have an email address so that people can talk to you and know how to contact you. If the Internet were a gated community, an email address would be your key to get in. It will be the key that gets you past merely 'looking' and into 'doing'.

There are a lot of free email services out there to choose from, but the winner by far is Gmail. The one problem with Gmail is, you can't sign up for it, you have to be "invited". With no friends on the internet, there is no way for you to be magically invited. This is unfair to our computerless brethren because that means you have to be "in" in order to get "in". Absolute snobbery.

There are quite a few brave souls on the internet that will give anyone an invite that wants one. All you have to do is send them your email address and they'll email you an invite. Of course that means you need to already have an email address. Which means you have to be "in" in order to get "in". It's really a vicious cycle.

If you look over to the side, you will see that I have posted a link right to a Gmail Invite. If you don't have an email address at all, feel free to use that invite to get one. Or you can get one from other email venders that don't require you to be "in", like Yahoo! Mail and HotMail, but I don't recommend it. I think the interface to Gmail is much easier to use and will give you fewer headaches.

BUT DON'T GO YET. You are about to embark on one of the most important decisions you will ever make concerning your online identity. No, not about whether you want to be a Paladin or a Wizard; you are about to choose your online name.

Email addresses have a strange way of following you around the internet and becoming your virtual name where ever you go. People online won't call you Jim or Sarah, they'll call you monkeyBa11 or TuberTop. Seriously, you don't want to be called TuberTop the rest of your life.

When you're asked to pick a username for a site, you will almost always use your email address. Friends will know you by your email address and your email address will show up everywhere you've been. I told you this was your key online and the reason is because it's used everywhere online.

When I first signed up for AOL way back in 1994, I tried a number of screen names before I was able to find one that wasn't already used (if you choose a name already in use on Gmail, you'll know what I mean). The name I eventually got stuck with: FirstClown. And it's followed me around like an Albatross ever since.

Choose carefully.

Next time, I'll talk about all the great things you can do with this new email address. If you have any questions or comments on this series, email me at lifeelectric @ firstclown.us, or leave a comment below.

P.S. If you still don't have an email address and wan't to tell me something about this post, you can fake the email address in the comment box below. I only make it required so that people remember to enter it if they want me to email them back.