One of my buddies, Kent, was interested in starting a blog like mine and he asked me what I used. So, let’s cut right to it.
Here are the sites/tools I use:
• WordPress (blogging platform)
• Dreamhost (for hosting my site and some images)
• Godaddy (for hosting my domain)
• Flickr (for hosting most of my high quality photos)
• Marsedit (my OS X native client for blogging)
• IA Writer (for drafting longer form posts)
• Tweetfeed (for auto publishing my posts to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn)
• Dreamweaver (kind of embarrassing)
• Coda (yep, keeping’ it alive)
• Macbook 11″ Early 2010 (I use either this or a Macbook Pro 15″)
So, what’s the best way to blog and share photos? Well, this blog was created using WordPress. You can do a ton with WP, but I’ll warn you—it’s a serious pain to customize the design. In addition, posting and publishing with photos isn’t super efficient… unless you have an special client for it.
Blogging Alternatives
If you created a blog today, I’d say Tumblr would be decent. They definitely make it easier to post, and their mobile client was dead simple. I’d also say Medium would be an excellent alternative. In fact, if I were to start a blog today, I’d probably go with Medium first. There’s a little stigma tied to it, but honestly, they make writing and posting dead simple.
Photos
As for hosting photos, there’s really no winner in this department. For me, I’m still using Flickr. It works with my OS X client, MarsEdit. If you only post photos, Instagram would probably be the best way to go, but the downside is that the photos are low-resolution. Unfortunately, there’s no great answer here.
Blogging for the Long Term
If you’re deciding to start up a blog, just know that you won’t get as much reward as posting content on Facebook or Instagram. There’s a good chance that you’ll stop because there are no engagement/reward loops. For example, you’ll start up a blog, and then after 3 months you’ll grow tired of it.
Now that you know the draw backs, go out there and start blogging. And let me know if you guys can recommend any better tools for me to use. There are days where I would love to move to another blogging platform, but I always end up coming back to wordpress. *sigh*
The Origins of jeffwongdesign.com
I’d like to thank Foo for getting me into blogging. Jeffwongdesign.com is about 8 years, and sharing here has been refreshing. Foo always described a blog as being a playground with no real rules. It’s nice to have a place where you can write and post whatever/whenever, without anyone looking over your shoulder. It’s also kind of cool walk down memory lane and browse through old posts on occasion. ^_^