Beer and Blog Portland

That’s right, time to End Bloglessness, AGAIN! Whoo-Hoo! Gather up your friends, family, or any one else you can think of who has been looking to start a blog and come join us!

Sunday, October 4th from 12:00-5:00pm

Format

Each session will be 1 hour: 15 minute presentation and 45 minutes of assisted help. During assisted help, attendees can raise their hands to get help from one of our assistants. Assistants are folks from the Portland tech scene that have done this process before who can help you with your questions.

Agenda

• Session 1 – Sign up for your blog 12:00-1:00pm;
• Session 2 – Dial in the settings for your blog 1:00-2:00pm;
• Session 3 – Intro to posting on your blog 2:00-3:00pm;
• Session 4 – How to promote your blog 3:00-4:00pm;
• 4:00-5:00pm will be an open help time to ask help with anything you’d like.

What to expect

We are focusing on WordPress blogs for this workshop. We chose WordPress so that if your blog is going well enough and you need to graduate to a hosted blog, you’re data and experience will be compatible.
By the time you leave the workshop, you’ll have a blog that is ready to go and some direction on how to connect with other local bloggers. We are expecting people from all skill levels, including the technically challenged. Everyone will be treated with respect and will be encouraged.
We’ll be hosting the event at Webtrends. There are some computers available to use, but we highly recommend bringing your laptop if you have one as there likely won’t be enough computers for everyone.

Help us get the word out!

Most of the people we’re hoping to reach are either to far outside of our social circles or are offline completely. We could use your help in letting people know about this free workshop to get a blog up and running. We don’t care if your motivation to blog is personal, professional, or political; we’ll help you get one up and running.

• Tweet the link to this page http://bit.ly/ufsYL
• Email this page to a friend
• RSVP on Upcoming and Calagator
• Tell someone in real life using your voice. Crazy, huh?

Why is this free?

We’re hoping to make new friends and be good citizens. We don’t want to be an insular group, so we want to enable others to join. And, because we’re Portlanders inspired by other Portlanders to DIY and that Yes We Can.

Help out

If you have experience with installing WordPress, we’d love to have you help answer people’s questions. Please leave us a comment below if you’re interested in helping!

Attendees of End Bloglessness can do these three things to help us start quickly:

1. Buy your hosting package and domain name. Not sure who to use? Try Bluehost.com. Domain name is free with a 1 year purchase (we don’t get any money from you hosting with them).
2. Download the plugins we’ll be installing at http://www.beerandblog.com/plugins.zip
3. Download the theme we’re going to start you out with http://getk2.com/download/

Ok, looking forward to seeing you all soon!!

That’s what we’re doing this Friday. Partially because we’re doing the End Bloglessness workshop this Saturday. And, because hosting is like religion and everyone’s path is different. All bloggers need to check-in with their hosting needs and make sure they are still on the right path.

For those looking to End their Bloglessness this weekend

Coming this Friday is a good way to be ready for Saturday’s workshop because you’ll need your own hosting to follow along with the install process. You can get some help buying your hosting account on Friday, which will make your Saturday smoother. Workshop attendees without hosting will have to take notes and repeat at home later or buy hosting on the spot (which can be stressful when you want to take time to select a domain name).

This will also be a good way to meet some of the folks you’ll be blogging with. They’ll be many happy faces excited to tell you about your upcoming adventures. You may learn that the hosting account you want is different from the one I’ll be sharing about at the workshop.

For the Beer and Blog Regulars

I know I’ve learned a lot about hosting the painful way over the years. Just recently I learned a bit about the unique hosting requirements for WPMU. I still don’t have a hosting company that I love for every project. It would be good to talk about hosting again and see if someone knows the magic hosting package. Think hosting doesn’t matter, I bet you’ll learn something about hosting you didn’t know.

RSVP on Upcoming and Calagator

Hosting packages

When you’re starting out, your hosting needs are pretty simple. Since we’ll be working with WordPress, you’ll need PHP and MySQL, which is fairly common. I recommend staying away from Windows based hosting because it’s usually not set up well for open source applications, like WordPress. Here are a few of the characteristics to look out for:

• Shared Server – This means you share your server with other websites. Sharing the hardwarre allows hosting companies to offer the accounts for cheaper. Sites with less than 100K visitors per month won’t appreciate the difference between a shared or dedicated server, so save your money.
• Unlimited features – Hosting has become an inexpensive commodity. Most hosting companies will offer you unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage space, and more. The reason is that they know few accounts actually user their hosting features anywhere near the limits. Steer clear of hosting accounts that impose limits like 1 GB of bandwidth a month because there are enough
• cPanel, ideally with Fantastico – cPanel is a nicely done graphic interface for managing your server. Having it means you don’t need to use a terminal or Unix commands to do tasks like create an email account or create a database. Fantastico is a sweet feature available for cPanel that is an installer for things like WordPress. So to install a WordPress blog using Fantastico makes it a one-click process. Very handy for the new blogger.
• 24/7 domestic phone tech support – I know several big name hosting companies that offer 24/7 domestic phone support, so don’t put up with anything less.
• $10 or less per month – Starting out, you shouldn’t spend more than this or you’re getting hosed.

The further you go in blogging, your needs may become more complex. You might need more bandwidth, more servers, or more privileges. System Administrators and Programmers may want things like shell access or co-location, but these are not concerns for the starting blogger.

Here a few hosting companies that offer the above amenities:

• Bluehost
• Media Temple
• PowWeb

There are some hosting companies that I don’t recommend, such as Go Daddy. They are in the business of upselling, so it’s confusing to work with them because you have to constantly turn down sales pitches.