This is Part 2 in a series.  Part 1 is here.

In Part 1 I made the case that Facebook and Twitter had become toxic places and I suggest that blogging, micro blogging and long form blogging (either or both) on your own blog was a better choice

Here in Part 2 I’m going to recommend 3 blogging platforms as good places to get started.  I’m also going to make the case for going to the added expense of buying your own domain.  You can investigate each.

Three Best Blogging Platforms

1. Micro.blog - $5 per month, charged monthly, gets you a micro + long form + photo blog. Bring your own domain and you can use it, although it is not required.  No ads. No tracking. No selling your private information to third parties. Micro.blog has it’s own social network.  You also have the option to cross post to Twitter, Medium, Linkedin, Tumblr, Mastodon. Inclusive.  Every time you start a new post to the social network a new blog entry is automatically made.  It’s very easy to move your content to or from Micro.blog to Wordpress, especially if you have your own domain.  This means you are not locked in. Example: Manton.org is a blog on Micro.blog
2. Wordpress.com - Free with ads on a subdomain (ie. MYBLOGNAME.wordpress.com) $4 per month, charged annually, to use your own domain (ie. myblogname.com) and get rid of ads. Wordpress.com gives you a lot for both free and paid versions.  You can set it up to cross post to Twitter, Linkdin, Tumblr, Facebook (post to FB Page only), G+ (being discontinued by Google).  Wordpress was designed for long form blog posts.  You can micro blog and photo blog from it but posting updates is not quite as fast and easy as Micro.blog.
3. Self Hosted Wordpress - This requires more experience of an intermediate level.  You must have your own domain.  What I recommend is you get your own “C-Panel” type hosting account, which will give you a easy setup wizard to install your own instance of Wordpress blogging script. Self hosting gives you the most control.  If you like to arrange things “just so” self hosting gives you thousands of plugins which can add capabilities to your blog.  Self hosting Wordpress costs only a little more than Micro.blog or Wordpress.com but it is a bit more to learn. Ramblinggit.com is a self hosted blog.

Why These 3?

Micro.blog

Wordpress.com

About 25% of websites are using some form of Wordpress.

Self Hosted Wordpress

Using Your Own Domain

• You establish your own address or home if you will, on the Internet.  You own the domain it is like a permanent address that stays the same no matter what host you are on.
• Your hyperlinks will not change. So if somebody has bookmarked one of your posts or linked to it on their own site the link will not be broken even if you move.

Don’t feel limited to getting a *.com domain.  In the old days individuals often used *.org to represent a personal blog because it was less commercial sounding.  *.info, *.blog, *.name, *.me and a host of others can also be used.

I may do followup posts giving more detail on each option but this will get you started investigating each one.  If you have questions feel free to post them in the comments below. I will answer.

Part 3: Creating the Blog Network continues the series.

Fetch recommendations from threads at micro.blog. Explore links from Discover.

This is for exploring and discovering conversations at Micro.blog and intended mainly for Micro.blog users.  However, non-users can utilize part of it’s capability.

Users and Non-users alike can explore many of the sub-category topics on Micro.blog.  Users can find people to follow or conversations to join in on too.

Bookmark: ADN Finder

This is a social network username directory.  If you know your friends username on Twitter, Micro.blog, Mastodon or (defunct) App.net you can find their handle on the others.  Very handy if someone you follow has left Twitter, or if you are migrating to some new social networks and want your friends to find you.

When I find an interesting new tool, I like to think of all the ways I can use it.  When I found out I could put HTML on a Page on a Micro.blog hosted blog it got me thinking.

So what else will work there?  Nothing earth shattering here but a couple of small ideas.

One thing you can do is make a webring landing page.  The key here is that you can post HTML to Pages on MB.

For those that don’t remember the webring heydays of the 1990’s, webmasters would join several webrings,  now you didn’t want all those ring codes taking up space on your index page so you created a separate page for your webring codes.  Usually visitors would enter and leave the site by this page.

Landing Page:

Now Micro.blog does have a footer space you can place HTML in, but what if you wanted to join several rings?  You create that landing page.

1. in your MB admin you create a new page.  Name in something like “Webrings” so visitors know where to find the code.
2. Join a webring somewhere.  Use yoursite.com/webrings/ as the page you join with.
3. Place the webring code on that page. (An HTML code should work.  I’m not sure if a javascript code will work but you can try.)
4. You probably should place a greeting on that page explaining where visitors are at.  You want to make the ring easy to navigate.

Ring Homepage:

Let’s say you want to start your own webring and run it.  You can start a webring at a ring host.  I recommend Webringo.  Old school rings need a Homepage where you set out the criteria of your webring (example).

Have some fun!

What other things can you do with a micro.blog Page?

I just added an Advanced Search to my Micro.blog hosted blog. I have 2 domains for two blogs one on Wordpress and one on Micro.blog. I found Duckduckgo Search Box creator would let me do a site search of several domains at one time.

1. I created a search box for both domains. 2. I created a new Page, “Advanced Search” on my Micro.blog blog. 3. Pasted the searchbox code one the page. Saved. And it works and it’s free.

Now I’m going to do the same on my Wordpress blog.

I’m going to focus on Micro.blog hosted blogs, but these three providers will work for Wordpress too.

Recently, Micro.blog added the ability to add HTML code in the footer area of your hosted blog.  This is great for things like webrings.  It’s also good for JavaScript code so I immediately added a web traffic stats counter.

Why analytics?  As a webmaster I still think it important to have an idea of where your visitors are coming from, how they find you, what posts they are interested in, and are they using a phone or computer.

There are three that I looked at:

Statcounter.com - the free service is generous for most blogs.  The stats are not super detailed like the others but they are sufficient for me.  Statcounter offers 4 advantages: 1. the free service is decent, 2. they offer a version of the code to put on your site that is compatible with just about every CMS platform out there plus instructions, 3. near real-time reporting, 4. You can see what your stats are very quickly.  I’m using Statcounter.

Yandex Metrica - Russian search engine Yandex offers free hosted stats that are considered equal to or maybe better than the same offering from Google.  And I repeat, it’s free.  Yandex is straightforward about it, they are in the business of indexing the web and offering analytics helps them find new URL’s and do their job.  Hence it’s free.  If you want detailed stats and good graphs I suggest trying Yandex.

Google Analytics - this is the Big Boy on the block and outside of looking at your server logs this GA has been the gold standard for many websites and bloggers.  With that said, I don’t recommend Google Analytics: 1. Google is voracious on mining data on websites and individuals I’m just not going to hand them the inside data on any of my websites on a silver platter,  2. I have used them in the past and GA can cause some serious slowdowns on your site’s page loading times, 3. when I used them the data was not real time, there was always a lag.

No remotely hosted analytics service is going to detect or report all web traffic to your site only server logs will do that.  For bloggers these services are good enough.

Bookmarked: For the list of uses for Micro.blog.  Chris Aldrich wrote the list as part of a reply/response to a link he was saving.

I love Micro.blog and I love the Duckduckgo (DDG) search engine.  If you have a Micro.blog hosted blog, some of the themes (last I looked) had a site search box powered by DDG.  I had one for a few months.

Site search is important on a blog.  What I found was DDG was taking quite a long time to index any pages on my Micro.blog blog.  This kinda made the site search unusable.  So the answer is to get DDG to index more.

Somewhere along the line I ran across this:

How to get indexed on DuckDuckGo if you’re running a smaller website

Even though that article is a few years old, it seems to dovetail with something I saw when testing DDG site search on more established blogs, when I kept noticing some mention about Yandex.com on the Duckduckgo search results pages.

What you are going to do is:

1. Go to Yandex.com and register for Webmaster Tools.  (This is similar to Google or Bing’s Webmaster tools.
2. Submit your site to Yandex using the webmaster tools.

This article brings out so many good points.

1. You really can’t quit Facebook unless you (and hopefully your friends) have someplace to go.

2. Future social networks need to be decentralized yet able to communicate with each other. I like this about Mastodon and Friendica. I’m not sure if Micro.blog is moving towards that or not. You need to be able to take your data from one social network to another if you decide to leave.

3. A network needs to be free of advertising and commercial interests, so there is no incentive to mine your data and personal information.

www.npr.org/sections/…

The thing is that there are two major models for social networks: Twitter model and Facebook model. Both have their uses, strengths and weaknesses.

Twitter model is less personal, it’s a bit like artillery shells, you make a post and fire and forget. The Twitter model reduces most things into short soundbites. That’s bad trying to discuss complex issues, but it’s great for sharing neat things you have found on the web.

The Facebook model is more immersive, and if your friends are online the discussions can be more complex. Groups allow subsets of people to discuss common interests. And everything can be discussed in more detail (and better threaded) than Twitter model sites. At the same time, Facebook model sites also allow you to post in soundbites. The Facebook model sites seem more personal.

Alt Social Networks. Places you and your posse can go:

Friendica if you like Facebook you will like Friendica. It’s a FB clone in many ways. As I said in my review of Friendica there is a lot to like. Forget the stuff about running your own Friendica network, just hit the “Try it” button on the Friendica site, find a community and try it. Find a community that lets you crosspost to Facebook and your friends might not know you are gone.

Mastodon is a really good Twitter clone. The difference is there are many different Mastodon communities on many different servers in different countries. Mastodon lends itself to themed communities (ie. pagan, furry, kink, literature, writers, and some general topic). You can follow people on other Mastodon communities (called Instances) and their posts will appear in your timeline. So you might join a Mastodon instance for writers and your friend might join one for photography but you can still follow and talk to one another.

Micro.blog is both a micro and long-post blogging platform that is also a very nice social network. It’s not really a clone of anything which is good. It is more of a Third Way. From Micro.blog you can crosspost to Twitter, FB and/or Medium. It costs $5 per month but there are no ads, tracking and you get a lot of features for that. To me the biggest benefit of Micro.blog is I can seamlessly switch between microblogging (short posts) and writing longer posts. This post was a perfect example: it started out as a quick “Lookie here a neat article” post with a link but it turned into something Real Long because I had more to say. Because words convey your thoughts. Thoughts can’t be limited to soundbites. What you say, your thoughts, are important - they have value. Above all things, write what you will. Freedom of format is cool.