The Technical Side of Blogging
As I have said before, my technical skills are not the greatest. I have no idea how to design a blog, let alone deal with complexities such as coding. When it comes down to it, I am a writer and that is pretty much what I do. For everything technical, I have to farm out the work to one of my contractors; which is not a huge deal, I suppose. But with that being said, it does cost money, and waiting for them to do the work is not always the easiest thing to do.
Leo over at the Idiot Affiliate recently gave me a plug entitled, “Learn Freelance Writing and Blogging with Chris Blogging.†I was quite happy to see this as I am always interested in spreading my knowledge, and of course, learning from others in the process. But in the last paragraph of his post, I read something that really caught my eye.
“On a side note, I encourage Chris to pick up that technical torch and run with it for awhile. It isn’t as hard as you think it is!â€
This got me thinking; maybe he is right? All this time I have been concentrating on writing, but never taking the time to learn the technical side of blogging.
So my question is, how can I learn about design, coding, and all that other good stuff? Again, since I have no idea what this is all about, I really don’t know where to start.
Any suggestions would be great. After all, if I am going to continue to grow this blog, doing some design work and adding new features is a must.
Let me know how you developed your technical skills. Hopefully this is something that I can work on in the near future!
July 30th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I totally disagree with idiot affiliate. Those that succeed focus on their strengths and outsource what they are weak in.
July 30th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Joe – I can see where you are coming from, and that is why I spend so much time writing. But with that being said, I have always wanted to learn more about the backend of blogs, etc. I guess it is all a matter of how much time you have, and what goals you are trying to accomplish!
July 30th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I have found that whenever you are forced into outside contracting for something core to your business, you put your entire business in that contractor’s hands. I have learned through the years it is always a good thing to have a basic core knowledge of everything your business relies upon. In your case, this would be having some general programming and design knowledge.
With a functional knowledge of programming and designing, you will be better informed when making your business decisions. What may seem like a simple change to you, could involve hours upon hours of coding. Likewise, that complex idea could be quick and easy to implement. Knowing which is which, before you ask your consultant to do it, will allow you to negotiate scheduling and pricing from a position of strength.
Do you need to be able to completely program and design a blog from scratch? Only if you want to. But, knowing the difference between a CSS-driven website and a table-driven website, what it means for a website to “validate”, etc. can’t hurt you and can only make it easier for you to convey what you want to your contractor.
So you know where I am coming from, my education combined Computer Science and Communication Arts and I have done high-level technical support (used to manage mainframes) and technical writing. I now focus on web writing, business website promotions, and several small personal sites. I am fairly handy at programming my designs; I only wish I was more clever and creative with them.
July 30th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I learned by doing. I’ve been doing web design since 1996 or so. Of course, back then, there really was less to know!
July 30th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
I echo what dcr said. I hate coding and figuring out PHP and stuff, but it helps when you have problems. Stick to what you do best, and only do other stuff if you absolutely have to.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:06 am
There is definitely two ways of looking at this problem. The side that says you should do what you are good at, and of course, the side that says you should learn everything so that you can be in complete control at all times.
For me, I am leaning towards slowly learning the technical side of blogging. I don’t want to devote too much time to this, but I hope to move in that direction until I am at least capable of the basics!
Thanks for all the info!
July 31st, 2007 at 12:36 pm
The big question is what do you want to do?
I went from being a complete novice to putting together my own HTML website, and being a confident WordPress ‘fiddler’ just through using Google. I get by with some WYSIWYG tools and a smattering of HTML/CSS knowledge now and it’s enough for me.
I agree that you need to know something. You don’t want to have to call (and/or pay) someone every time you want a plugin installed, or a minor fix.
So, what do you want to be able to do?
July 31st, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Agree with some of the comments above, particularly the last one: It helps if you can narrow things down, break the whole process up into friendly chunks instead of looking it all as one huge seascape of things to learn.
If you try to add plugins, it helps to know which ones will truly benefit your blog and how to install the plugins– as well as tweak them if something goes wrong.
While knowing some of the basics will help a lot in letting you make decisions, time is valuable… letting contractors do most of the work isn’t a bad idea, and in fact many successful entrepreneurs recommend it.
But all that being said, I got to the level I’m at now by experimenting… reading up helps, but actually getting in and doing something is what imparts real understanding of a concept.
If you want to feel free to experiment without fearing that you’ll wreck your blog, you might try working with a guinea pig blog that exists solely for this purpose. Blog-Op has a post on this: http://blog-op.com/use-a-test-blog-to-avoid-nasty-surprises/
July 31st, 2007 at 2:04 pm
V. Neely – You are right about doing instead of reading. Even though I read tons, I never feel comfortable until I get into things on my own!
July 31st, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I should click on the names of people who comment more often. I didn’t realize Chris Lodge there was running the blog I just recommended for learning to set up a guinea pig blog.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:04 pm
[...] was only a few comments away from being number one for July. Over at his blog, Chris talked about the technical side of blogging, saying figuring out the design and coding side of things isn’t as hard as you may think! [...]