Blog Platforms for Artists Including Potters and Clay People
Warning: really long!
My old blog, http://cmguajardo.blogspot.com has been cached by Blogger even though I deleted it a few days ago. Be careful what you post - it could be there forever even if you don’t want it there anymore!
Back in March, I decided to make the move from Blogger to a paid self hosted Wordpress blog after testing out several different platforms including, Vox, Live Journal, Typepad, Movable Type, Sitekreator, Weebly, Wordpress.com (which is hosted free and not to be confused with wordpress.org) and a few others.
Why?
When I first decided to really give being a studio artist a real shot after dropping out of the graduate landscape architecture program at UCD in 2005, I didn’t know what blogging even was until I joined a virtual multi-disciplinary art group called Wet Canvas (WC for short) in January 2006 and didn’t really know how to navigate my way around all the different available technologies. WC has a ton of information for artists and I immediately started reading the “internet strategies” thread since, intuitively, I knew that this is a huge part of being a 21st C artist.
Not being completely confident of my longterm blogging or independent studio artist future, I looked for a FREE blogging platform. Time would be my only investment.
I initially signed up with MSN Live Spaces (bundled with Qwest - my ISP) and then later opened a blogger account because that seemed like the most popular platform at the time. When I first started blogging, I really was new to internet technology even though I had been browsing the ‘net and reading my email for years prior. Slowly, I became more proficient and as I visited more and more blogs, I would find applications I wanted to implement on my own blog and started recognizing those that worked well in both design and function. Later, I became dissatisfied with the canned templates, and went in search of “skins” so that I could customize my blog which ultimately led me to taking some free online HTML courses to understand how it all worked together.
