My Side Door

On my road to make my real estate blog, I took a couple of detours.  First I started with Blogger.com.  It was pretty easy to get set up, but I was having two problems.  The first was that I wanted to host the blog on my own server, but the publishing process didn’t seem to work very well.  The second, and more significant problem, was that a Blogger.com blog is a bit plain, and seemed lacking in comparison to other blogs I had seen.

 So I did what I should have done from the beginning, and fired up the Synaptic Package installer on my Linux box.  I recognize that you probably don’t know what that means, but Synaptic lists almost every bit of free software that you can get for a Linux Server.  It’s not a fairly nice search tool, so I searched for blog.  And near the end of the search I found WordPress. 

And thanks to their famous 5 minute install….5 minutes later I was up and running.  Well, almost.  But it was fairly easy to set up.  The hard part, is picking a theme.  There must be 100′s of themes you can choose from, and naturally none of them seem quite right.  But I found a theme I felt I could work with, and customized it over the course of a few days.  I also looked for plug-ins that would add custom features to the basic wordpress software, like SEO optimization, sitemap generation, and a different post editor.

I’m still looking to improve my blog’s look and features, but as they say, it’s good enough for now.  SideDoor, was substantially easier, since I knew how to do the setup.  It really came down to picking a theme.

If you want your own blog, Blogger.com is a good place to start.  But WordPress.com is also a good place to start.  Custom themes have a small cost at WordPress, but the software is substantially better.