Blog Mechanics

My mobile blogging set-up.

My mobile blogging set-up.

A few artists have asked about the technical side of doing a blog so I thought I’d do a quick post. This blog is running off the free WordPress software and its all hosted on Bluehost, which I have been happy with. Bluehost has all the tools you need and is pretty easy to get running, and its cheap. It won’t handle getting on the front page of reddit, but you can sign up at MediaTemple for twice the price if that’s a possibility. The theme for the blog is Simplex, and the gallery plug-in is NextGen Gallery which, to be honest, is less than stellar, but its the best gallery of the ones I’ve tried.

For the hardware, I try to only buy gadgets and computer gear that have a large community of online users as I find active forums better than relying on the manufacturer’s support. The camera I’m currently using is a Panasonic GH1 as I want to start adding more video to the site, the active forum I follow for it is DVXUser. For blogging while I move around, I have a small Dell mini 9 which is souped up and hackintoshed thanks to the guys over at the MyDellMini forums. The cellphone is a Nokia N82. Its a good phone with real GPS and a decent 5MP camera (and it geotags the photos), it also doubles as a mobile wi-fi spot using JoikuSpot which is the most useful data-tethering program I’ve found. (It takes your 3G data connection and broadcasts it as wi-fi, much easier than fussing with cables and drivers. It works with all smart phones, except the iphone of course -ha ha suckers). My home computer is home made and built around a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R motherboard which I love, 8GB of ram, 2.8 ghz core 2 duo (Wolfdale), 2 TB of storage in Raid 5 and dual boots windows7 and osX.