1. Shall I start with a self-hosted blog or (publically) hosted blog? – Okay if this is the first question in mind, you may have little knowledge about what self-hosted and publically-hosted blog are all about. Self-hosted blog means you sign-up or buy a hosting space for your blog, and you register your own domain for it. For example, you will have your blog URL as www.myfirstblog.com. A publically hosted blog is provided by blogging services, such as Google Blogspot (Blogger) or Wordpress.com, which you can sign up for a free account and start blogging there. The benefits of each will be detailed in the next two questions.

2. What is the benefit of a self-hosted blog? – Of course, if the little money that may cost about a few hundred in RM a year is not an issue for you, then you shall consider the self-hosted blog. Self-hosted blog gives you the flexibility of having your own domain, hosting space and the most important is you can easily access to any webpages, which allows you to highly customize your own web templates for future expansion. For example, if you intend to bring your blog to a stage which it’s able to start making money online, you shall consider to start with a self-hosted blog if the initial startup little investment and your own technical know-how is not an issue. As self-hosted blog gives you freedom of customizing your own blog template, which you can easily add in advertisements for making money online.

3. What is the benefit of a hosted blog? – Of course, it’s free, and you can start anytime without dealing with too much technical hassle. But of course, you’ll start with a sub-domain for a free account e.g ketyung.blogspot.com, myfirstblog.wordpress.com etc instead of on your own domain. But these days, services like Blogger and Wordpress.com also offer your own domain by charging you a fee. As mentioned a hosted blog, may give you some inflexibility for customizing your blog templates for adding advertisement or some other necessary expansions.

4. What blogging platform or software shall I use for my own self-hosted blog ? – Of course , the answer will be Wordpress, which can be downloaded from Wordpress.org. Why Wordpress? As it’s free and open source! Of course, if you have little budget then you could some others like MovableType etc. For Wordpress, the little downside is since it’s opensource, you’ll need to have some technical knowledge of handling PHP and MySQL database, and you’ll have to keep yourself following it for an update version, since it’s one of the most hackable software due to its openness and freely to use.

5. Where to find a good hosting for my blog? – Okay, if you decided to have a self-hosted blog, then you’ll surely need to find a hosting space for your blog. Nowadays, you can find shared hosting as low as USD $8 per month or about USD $100 a year, which is equivalent to RM350 per year. So, it’s just about RM30 a month which is very much cheaper than renting a shop locally to start selling goods.

So, the question is where to find a good hosting? Okay, I’ll definitely tell you to maintain the cost as low as possible, if your main point is to probably make some money online a couple of months later. For a start, I recommend to go for a shared hosting. Please do NOT be misled by others that you’d need a dedicated hosting which would cost you more than USD $150 a month. If you expect a pretty low traffic of less than 3,000 unique visitors a day for the initial few years, then a shared hosting shall do well. And I strongly recommend BlueHost.com. I’ve used Bluehost.com for a couple of years, they offer only shared hosting that costs only about USD$107 per year (if you sign up only for a year and pay yearly) and costs less about USD $90+ a year if you sign up for more than a year.

With only about $100 a year, you’ll get 300GB space, with MySQL databases, unlimited bandwidth and transfer, which is definitely suitable for a Wordpress-powered self-hosted blog. My Gadget Blog is being hosted on Bluehost.com for years, and I’m getting a unique daily visitor of 3,000+ and total pageview of 120,000 per month, has NO problem at all hosted on Bluehost.com. But of course, occasionally there are some little down times with the MySQL db with a site that has more than 3,000 daily unique visitors, but Bluehost provides live chat support, and once reported, it shall then be solved within minutes.

6. How do I get my blog on Google ? – After all the setup and you’ve got your blog up and running, then of course, you shall start writing your interesting blog post. And you want more traffic, visitors and visibility of your blog. Surely, you’ve heard of others saying that building organic traffic for your blog, or at least when people search on Google, it shall come out. In order to get on Google, you’ll have a couple of things that you need to do.

Google judges a website or blog visibility on the Google search engine by the pagerank of the website or the blog. But I won’t go into very detailed what the pagerank is, since you’re just a newbie, maybe the subsequent posts on SmartBorneo will cover more details about this. In short, Google values a website or a blog by looking at how many incoming links from other websites or blogs to your website or blog. If a website or blog has more incoming links, it shall be given a higher value or higher pagerank, which shall reflect a higher chance to appear on Google when others search for some particular keywords. But these days, building incoming links is not an easy task, which definitely deserves a dedicated blog post on SmartBorneo here to explain more about it later.

For a quick start to get incoming links, if you’re a good writer, you shall consider submitting various articles which have the hyperlink of your blog URL embedded in them, to those article directories. Or you shall link to other blogs, make friends with them, getting them to link back to you, if you continuously produce quality articles/blog posts. Yes, the basic of increasing visibility of your blog is you continuously write good and interesting blog posts for your blog, which shall attract more people to link to you. And of course, there will be some other elements, that you need to fine tune your Blogging software platform e.g Wordpress, mentioned above, to increase the advantages over some keyword searches on major search engines. But this topic shall be considered to be covered in more detailed in some other blog posts dedicated for Wordpress at SmartBorneo here.

Hope you enjoy this post, and get some useful tips to start blogging!

Meaning that doing so, they won’t have to host those images, and they’re stealing bandwidths from you. But you have a choice to control from being hot linked by others just to save some of your bandwidths. Or you’re simply pissed off as those original images that you’ve created by your own have simply been copied and pasted over. And they’ve even stolen the originality of your content.

To prevent from hot linking, you’ll just need to add some codes to your .htaccess, such as the following codes which I wanna prevent the four domains to hot link to my images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?wordpress\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

The users will get redirected to my PHP page /images/sorrynothotlinking.php which I build using PHP function imagecreatefromjpeg() to output an image that shows the “No Hot Linking” messages. You’ll probably could make it to point to another image file with either a .gif or .jpg extension. But I’ve found somehow the redirection will keep looping as it seems to have confused the webserver. So, I’ve then made a PHP script to do so.

By the way, in the occasion you wanna block all others from hot linking to your images except with few domains that you wanna allow, (lets say mysite1.com and mysite2.com as follows), you can add the following codes to your .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite1\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

Please note that if you only allow a few domains to be able to hot link to your images and block all the rest, will prevent those images to show up on email clients as well. As you’ll have lots of readers to subscribe your blog feed via FeedBlitz which delivers blog feed via emails. When they open up the feeds on the email clients they’ll see the “No Hot Link” images on each post and this is ugly.

The best way is to use method 1, just to block those sites or blogs or those you dislike which you’ve discovered that they hot link to you.