The $300 Blogger Challenge
If you're looking to promote your hobby, trying to educate customers, or simply want to entertain the masses, the Web is quickly becoming the medium of choice. These days, that means setting up a blog--preferably one that features video and podcasts as well as text. Starting a multimedia blog isn't hard. Mainly you need tools for creating and capturing content and the means for staying up-to-date in your area of expertise--technology, in my case.
Wed, September 02, 2009
Macworld — If you're looking to promote your hobby, trying to educate customers, or simply want to entertain the masses, the Web is quickly becoming the medium of choice. These days, that means setting up a blog--preferably one that features video and podcasts as well as text. Starting a multimedia blog isn't hard. Mainly you need tools for creating and capturing content and the means for staying up-to-date in your area of expertise--technology, in my case.
When I accepted Macworld's challenge to build a complete blogger setup for less than $300 (you can check out the rules here ), I knew I'd have to make some tough decisions and a few compromises. Here's what I ended up with.
The setup
Because of the multimedia aspects of the task, you'll need a reasonably powerful Mac. I started with a 13-inch MacBook, but an iMac would also fit the bill. I've assumed that you already have a camcorder--any DV camcorder made in the past several years will do nicely--though if you were desperate and willing to put up with lower-quality video, you could also get by with just the iSight built into your Mac. The rest we'll take care of with our $300 budget.
Words, words, words
To get my message to the world I'll start with a blog--a place to distribute and link to the content I create. Although an Apple MobileMe account provides a lovely Web space for such a blog--complete with picture and video galleries, beautiful templates, 20GB of file storage, and 200GB of monthly data transfer--it's a $99-per-year proposition, and that kind of money just doesn't grow on trees.
Thankfully, a variety of free blogging services are available. The two most popular are Google's Blogger and WordPress. I signed up for both and found that while I liked the more professional look of WordPress's templates and its roomier 3GB of storage (though you can't use this space for audio or video with a free account), Blogger was easier to get started with. The service offers just 1GB of storage; however, I could easily switch to WordPress later if I wanted to take advantage of its greater storage and configurability.
Because I prefer to craft my blogs offline with text tools that are more flexible than what Blogger provides, I also picked up a copy of Red Sweater Software's $30 MarsEdit 2 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ). The blog editor is slightly more expensive than illumineX's $19.95 ecto, but I find it more reliable and prefer its intuitive interface. And since I like to work with plain text and add my own HTML tags, I didn't miss ecto's rich-text editor, which lets you work without worrying about HTML code (if you don't speak HTML and don't care to learn, ecto is the better choice).
