How I started my blog

Introduction

I am a freelance software developer and technical writer. I am also the founder of Stardeveloper.com, a website that has articles, tutorials and walkthroughs to help you learn web application development using ASP.NET and JavaServer Pages. At the end of 2009, I decided to start my personal blog where I could talk about some of the things I was working on, in a more informal way, and share some of my insights with fellow developers, bloggers and beginners who want to one day step-up their level to live a free and independent life as a freelance software developer, author and technical writer.

Background

I started by writing my blog posts within a new forum that I created in the forums section on my website. But I soon realized that I needed a separate blogging space. I had to make a decision to either develop my own blogging software or use another one’s. In case you haven’t noticed, all of the background code that serves tutorials, registers users, and allows discussions in the forum, was all designed and developed by me. Like they say, you learn the most when you do it all by yourself.

The forums application does not allow anonymous users to post comments. That was a big limitation in itself. Besides, the layout of the forum gives an impression as if a question has been asked. It is not the same as reading a blog. I had to develop or use a blogging application.

But with blogging, I didn’t want to invest my time reinventing the wheel, unless I could do it better and I could do it differently than others. If I indeed had developed a blogging platform, I would have opened it up for others to participate, download and use the software as necessary. Perhaps after paying a small license fee, or even free if I had got a good following from developer community. But never got to think about that enough.

After giving both options some thought, I chose to not develop my own software for blogging purposes. Perhaps, it was because I became involved with developing my ASP.NET Newsletter application. I don’t know.

Self-hosted blog vs online blog hosting providers

Once I had let the thought, to invest the time in developing my own blogging application, go, I had to choose between downloading and installing a blogging application on my own server, that is, at Stardeveloper.com, or to outsource my blog’s hosting to other online blog hosting providers.

Self-hosting is very good if you want full control over your blog and want to customize it to the last bit to match your exisiting website’s theme and structure. Since I was just starting up, I wanted an easy entry into the blogging World. I chose to host my blog on one of the free online blog hosting providers. I short-listed the free blog hosting providers. For me, it was either WordPress or Tumblr.

WordPress

WordPress is a feature rich blogging platform. It is the most popular blogging application Worldwide. There is virtually no feature that a blog should have, from categories, pages and tags, to comments, that WordPress does not have. It even has a wonderful iPhone application. Creating a free blog at WordPress.com is not difficult at all.

But if you are just starting up and create a free blog on their servers, they show ads from time time. And the ads, my friend, are not pretty at all.

Tumblr

Tumblr is micro-blogging platform, which means that it is some where inbetween Twitter and Facebook on one side and full fledged blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, on the other. There is a huge collection of themes to choose from. Creating a new theme or customizing an existing one is very easy. You like to customize CSS or even change from 2-column to a 3-column layout of a theme? You can do so without paying a penny. Unlike WordPress, where you have to pay if you want to customize the CSS, every thing is free on Tumblr.

Why Tumblr?

Tumblr allow easy entry into the World of micro-blogging. You can select from a huge set of free themes. Creating new posts is very simple. Online editor is nice. You can email them anything, from video to pictures, and they’ll make a post of it and post it on your blog. Everything is automated and very nicely set. You can incorporate Disqus commenting system very easily in your blog to allow users to post comments on your website.

The best part is that they make it so easy for you to either customize an existing theme or develop your own theme from scratch, just like I did. The documentation is pretty nice. The server-side variables and blocks make it very easy to develop your own theme. The process is so simple that you have to try it yourself to get a true feel for it. And you don’t have to learn a new language, like PHP, if you want to do this.

You can also setup either a full domain, like stardeveloper.com, or a sub-domain, like blog.stardeveloper.com, to send traffic to your blog. So the address of your blog then becomes from something like yourname.tumblr.com to blog.yourwebsite.com. Cool!

Customized theme for my blog

Soon after I started my blog on Tumblr and setup a sub-domain, blog.stardeveloper.com, I created a new theme for my blog.

Old Theme

The theme was pretty simple, using mostly HTML and CSS. It loaded pretty fast and I liked its simple look. I setup a Disqus account for my blog and incorporated it into this theme.

It was all nice and working as such but then I began to work on a new theme for articles and tutorials at Stardeveloper.com. The new theme’s color scheme was different and layout was far superior to anything that my simple theme offered. The discrepancy between the two themes meant that when a user browsed from Stardeveloper.com to my blog, it looked like as if he has come to an entirely different website. I had to develop a common theme for both articles and blog section. I began work on a new theme for my blog at Tumblr.

New Theme

The new theme used the same color scheme as the new theme on the articles’ section. The layout was pretty straight forward and I used HTML and CSS to keep the load time of the blog, very low. Very few, if any, images were used in the new theme. I also changed the Disqus theme to make it look more incorporated within the blog.

This new theme was set live just days back.

Summary

In this blog post, I talked about why I decided to have my own blog and how I moved every step of the way to where my blog stands right now. I also commented a bit about why I chose Tumblr and shared my thoughts on developing and customizing themes on Tumblr.

I hope you found information in this post useful. Good luck!

You can follow Faisal Khan on twitter here.