The Beginning

A number of friends convinced me over the last few weeks that I should share some of my “home IT setup” with a broader community as they found my stuff inspiring and thought through . They all encouraged me to post some articles somewhere. I wasn’t convinced, but the idea was there and I began thinking about how and where to do it. Initially I thought about Facebook or Twitter, but I somehow I wanted to keep my Facebook page for my communication with my extended friends network and Twitter is too limited.

Yesterday morning I woke up early and the idea reappeared in my mind. Let’s do a blog. Call it “PersTechLife” and put some of the recent stuff I was working on in it. Ok, let’s do it.

First Steps

I never before built a blog. Some years back I had looked into the “Blogger” stuff and played around with the stuff Microsoft had provided with my MSN messenger account. As it was clear to me that I didn’t want to start from scratch I had to find some easy way to do blogging. So I started to do some research.

First of all I looked into the available iPhone apps and which sites they supported. I stumbled over WordPress and remembered that I had read something about it a while back. I recalled, capable but complex. I looked up their site and for test purposes created a blog including the necessary account. So far pretty simple. Some pages further into the eval the result looked compelling to me and I decided to continue with this solution.

What else?

What followed was a quick brainstorming list with the following items:

• Domain name and redirect
• Client for Mac, Windows and iPhone to post and edit
• Twitter update
• Picture provisioning
• RSS Feed

Domain name

As I use for my personal domain a dedicated provider, I quickly registered “PersTechLife.com” quickly there. If I had looked on the WordPress page carefully enough I might have saved some money and the implementation would have been simpler. The advantage with the chosen solution is, that all my domain names are stored and managed with one provider. However this step just took some minutes.
Check mark. Done.

Clients

As I started my research with an iPhone client, I quickly browsed through the options in Apple’s app store. As always, review browsing, feature list and price quickly made up my mind. I decided to go with BlogPress.

For the Mac a search came back with a number of reviews. Two of these reviews came up with a favourite, so I had a look at Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac. As they provide a 21 day eval version I’m giving it a try. So far I like the result.

For Windows I currently don’t have a solution. For now the online WordpPress capabilities might do.
For the moment completed.

Twitter update

Twitter became more and more important for me as a research ground. In previous times I would have queried Google or some other search site, but recently in some cases Twitter gave me good starting point while the more “conventional” search sites came up with nothing compelling. So to attract interest I thought that a Twitter update per post might help to gain interest. I quickly stumbled over twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter and installed it for now.
Check mark. Done.

Picture provisioning

For some of my envisioned posts I want to include photos. Overall my workflow for photos is currently sub-optimal. I suppose this is something I need to work on in general. So far I shoot pictures with my DSLR (Canon EOS 400D) or a small Fujifilm digital camera, insert the respective memory card in my media centre machine, copy the pictures to a dedicated folder hierarchy and import the photos into iPhoto. Pictures taken with my iPhone are directly imported to iPhoto. A small selection of these photos are then uploaded to Flickr and/or Facebook.

For a while I’m thinking about buying an Eye-Fi card to streamline the process. But this will be enough stuff for another post

This week I received my new iPhone 3GS. For the moment I decided to take all necessary pictures with the iPhone and upload them to Flickr for further processing and usage. So I quickly set up a dedicated account for the new blog and installed “Flickit” on my iPhone.
Check mark. Done.

RSS Feed

After looking through a number of design templates and layout options I had decided on one sidebar within WordPress. But I couldn’t find any “RSS Feed”-Widget. After some research I found an article on the WordPress FAQ a solution Put your feed in your sidebar « WordPress.com
Voila! Done.

Summary

Overall I’m pretty stunned, that it took only a couple of hours to get going with a blog. Asked some days ago I would have estimated that a couple of days would be required.

Now I’m on to some real content.

-PTL-