How to start a blog?

I was dumbstruck when one of my friend asked me what is a blog and I wrote this article for him and the next obvious question was:

hmm…that sounds interesting? How do I start a blog?

Now, starting a blog is the most easiest and the most challenging thing; yes challenging because you need to have content to post about in your blog and to post content you need to have ideas about blog posts; otherwise your blog would be among those thousands of dead blogs on the internet. Apart from content, what you need is a domain name like pranavbhat.info or pranavbhat.com. Along with a domain name you need to have a web hosting account with a web hosting company to host your blog.

Now, there are several domain name registrars out there who can register domains. Some of the web hosting companies also provide a free domain name with every web hosting account that you purchase. The web hosting company where i host this blog and several other websites is web hosting buzz. This company has been around for quite sometime now since 2002 and hence are really good at it.

Apart from a domain name and a web hosting account you need a good blogging software. WordPress available at wordpress.org is a popular blogging software and its free too. You can download it at WordPress.com/download

There are several other free blogging sites which offer to host your blogs for free, but i prefer that freedom which comes with having our own web hosting account and a domain and hosting our blog on it. I did write a post that describes the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org sometime back. WordPress.com is a free blog hosting service where as wordpress.org is a free blogging software which you can download and then install on your own.