We love the Blogging platform from Google called Blogger.com. We’ve been keeping our personal travel blog on it since 2003. This is what we teach at RV rallies in the seminar, “Every RVer needs a blog.” And, it is the subject of one of our more popular tutorial video series. We taught it again just this month in Episode 123 of What Does This Button Do.
Whenever we teach this class, one of the first questions is always “What is the difference between a blog and a website?”
Well … a Blog IS a website. It’s on the web, and it’s a site. It has text, images, videos, etc. It’s just a special kind of website, built by individual dated entries. In the beginning, that’s all a blog was – a series of dated entries. Over the years, the blogging tools, like the free Blogger.com, added the ability to create standalone “pages” as well as the dated “posts.” Ever since then, it’s gotten harder to make a distinction between a website and a blog. Now, I think the primary difference is that a blog is a lot easier. You just follow the instructions. Whenever you write a “Post” it gets put on your site in chronological order with all your other posts. When you create a “Page” it stands on its own – it’s not part of a series. You have to specify if you want a page to be listed on some kind of menu.
Personal Journals use Blogs
As I mentioned above, I’ve been keeping my personal travel journal on the web using a Blogger.com Blog. If you want to take a look, you’ll find it at GeeksOnTour.blogspot.com. If you go there, you’ll notice a menu across the top – just like a website! The Personal Blog menu item takes you to my series of nearly 2,000 posts which go back to 2003. I don’t have to do anything to keep those in order. It’s all automatic. If you look in the right sidebar, you’ll see a section called Archives. That’s where you’ll see all 2,000 posts organized by years and months. I did no work to create that listing, it’s automatic.
In addition to the series of posts, I’ve created several “Pages.” You’ll see a menu item called Our Maps where I’ve added a map for each year we’ve been on the road, and another called our Photos where I’ve put links to our Google Photos monthly albums.
Small Businesses can use Blogs
Our friends at TechnoRV have a blog. They also have a traditional website for their business as well.
| Website: TechnoRV.com
Custom Designed
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Blog: RVTechnologyInfo.com
Series of posts
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Lots of clubs use Blogs
When we spent the 2007-8 season at the RV resort called Palm Creek, we got involved with the Pickleball club. We convinced them that a Blog, using Blogger.com was a good way to create their web presence. We helped them set it up, then they haven’t needed our help ever since. It’s so easy that they can pass the job around from club member to other club members. Since it’s free, the club treasurer doesn’t have to get involved at all. There were other clubs at Palm Creek who set up blogs, and we created yet another blog just to be a “Table of Contents” to list all of the clubs. Check it out at PalmCreek.blogspot.com. Scroll down and you’ll see nearly 20 clubs listed! If you click thru, you’ll see that some of them use traditional website tools, some of them use a Blogger Blog, some of them even use Facebook. There are lots of ways to make websites these days. If you want free, and you want to create a series of entries, we think a Blog is the way to go. Or, you can have both, you can link to one from the other.
Learn How
If you want to know more about how to make a blog, check out Episode 123 of What Does This Button Do.
If you are a Geeks on Tour member, here is our series of tutorial videos on Blogger.
From 2003-2017 she traveled the country in an RV with her husband, Jim offering technology seminars at RV rallies, computer clubs, and senior centers. Now they travel the world and continue teaching on their website, GeeksOnTour.com, over Zoom, and on their YouTube channel. Specializing in the use of Google Photos, Chris teaches people how to get control of the thousands of photos and videos taken with both phones and cameras these days. She is designated by Google as a Diamond leve Product Expert for Google Photos.
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So can we add an “album” on our website for our campouts and luncheons. We just set up a website HillandDaleSams to link with VAGoodSam and we have schedule, about us, etc. but cannot figure how to add “album” for our dated photos. After reading your article on blogs, I think it would have been easier to set up a blog rather than a website but the website was initiated by our org webmaster. Thanks for any assistance you can give.
Maybe you could still do a blog – and just have a link from the website to the blog. The information that doesn’t change can stay on the website, then people will click thru to the blog for dated entries. If you put the photos on Google Photos, then you can make albums and include the links to the albums on the blog. Whaddaya think? You don’t actually see the photos on the screen in the blog – people click on a link to see the album of photos. Here’s one of our videos that explains: https://geeksontour.com/2017/03/469-google-photos-make-link-list-albums/