Creating a Genealogy Blog

Creating a Genealogy Blog Using a Blog to Write About Family History A blog, short for Web log, is basically a very easy-to-use Web site. No need to worry too much about creativity or code. Instead a blog is basically an online journal you just open it up and start to write which makes it a great medium for documenting your family history search and sharing it with the world. A Typical Blog Blogs share a common format, which makes it easy for readers to quickly skim for interesting or pertinent information. It its basic form, a typical blog contains: short, informational entries - generally arranged in reverse chronological ordera time and/or date for each postlinks to other blogs or Web sites for additional contentarchives of all previously posted content, sometimes arranged into categories Blogs dont have to be all text either. Most blog software makes it easy to add photos, charts, etc. to illustrate your posts. 1. Determine Your Purpose What do you want to communicate with your blog? A genealogy or family history blog can be used for many reasons to tell family stories, to document your research steps, to share your findings, to collaborate with family members or to display photos. Some genealogists have even created a blog to share daily entries from an ancestors diary, or to post family recipes. 2. Select a Blogging Platform The best way to understand the ease of blogging is to just jump right in. If you dont want to invest a lot of money in this at first, there are quite a few free blogging services on the Web, including Blogger, LiveJournal and WordPress. There are even blog hosting options geared specifically for genealogists, such as on the social networking site GenealogyWise. Alternatively, you can sign up for a hosted blogging service, such as TypePad, or pay for a standard hosted Web site and upload your own blogging software. 3. Select the Format Theme for Your Blog The best things about blogs is that they are very simple to use, but you will have to make some decisions about how you want your blog to look. color scheme and style - most blog software offers a set of pre-designed templates, so this is simply a matter of choosing the one you likecategories - Many blogs use categories to define the general theme of each post, making it easy to find all posts on a particular topic. Basically categories are an organizational scheme. You may choose to categorize by surname or by locality. Or you can categorize by topic - census, cemetery, deaths, etc. Or you can choose not to categorize your blog posts at all.your content team - if you want your blog to be a collaborative effort, then youll need to select which people you plan to give access to post to your blogcomments - If you want others to be able to post responses to your information, then you can open up comments on your blog. This makes it easy for other researchers to get in touch with you or add new information, but can sometimes attract a few crazies as well. You can always close comments if they dont work well for you. If you arent sure about some of this, dont worry. These are all decisions that can be changed and tweaked as you go. 4. Write Your First Blog Post Now that we have the preliminaries out of the way, it is time to create your first post. If you dont do a lot of writing, this will probably be the most difficult part of blogging. Break yourself into blogging gently by keeping your first posts short and sweet. Browse other family history blogs for inspiration. But try to write at least one new post every few days. 5. Publicize Your Blog Once you have a few posts on your blog, youll need an audience. Begin with an email to friends and family to let them know about your blog. If youre using a blogging service, then make sure that you turn on the ping option. This alerts the major blog directories every time you make a new post. You can also do this through sites such as Ping-O-matic. Youll also definitely want to join GeneaBloggers, where youll find yourself in good company among over 2,000 other genealogy bloggers. Consider participating in a few blog carnivals as well, such as the Carnival of Genealogy. 6. Keep it Fresh Starting a blog is the hard part, but your jobs not done yet. A blog is something you have to keep up with. You dont have to write every day, but you do need to add to it on a regular basis or people wont come back to read it. Vary what you write about to keep yourself interested. One day you can post some photos from a cemetery visit, and the next you can talk about a great new database you found online. The interactive, ongoing nature of a blog is one of the reasons it is such a good medium for genealogists - it keeps you thinking about, searching for and sharing your family history! Kimberly Powell, About.coms Genealogy Guide since 2000, is a professional genealogist and the author of Everything Family Tree, 2nd Edition (2006) and The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy (2008). Click here for more information on Kimberly Powell.