Guide to Blogging and Micro-Blogging

If you arrived here from Sea Island Presbyterian, you can skip on to the next paragraph.  For my regular readers, this post will seem a bit out of context.  As many of you know, Heather and I moved to Beaufort, South Carolina in September when she accepted the position as Associate Pastor of Sea Island Presbyterian Church.  During the spring and the fall, the church has a Wednesday night gathering called Kirk Night.  During spring and fall, there is dinner, fellowship, and small group meetings after dinner.  During the summer, however, attendance falls a bit and in place of the standard Kirk Night, we host four Wee Kirk Nights with a smaller menu and only one class, presentation, or activity.  For the first Week Kirk Night, Heather and I, along with the Director of Christian Education and her husband (my triathlon partner) did a short presentation on technology and ministry.  Instead of giving people dozens of links and details, I simply created this post and have provided the link to the group.

Blogging

As I mentioned in the presentation, there are numerous free blogging services for beginners and for advanced users.  My personal favorite is WordPress.com.  This is a hosted version of the software I use to operate this site.  Additionally, you can register an account with Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, and dozens of others.

For new users, I highly recommend checking out Lorelle on WordPress.  Lorelle is one of the best, if not the best, resource for all things WordPress, especially for new users.

Another great resource for new users is WordPress.tv.  This site, operated by WordPress, provides video tutorials for WordPress.com users.

I also found this video tutorial on YouTube.com that you may find useful.

Twitter

Since my fascination with Twitter has been growing a bit recently, I’ve published a few articles on Twitter that should provide a great introduction.

First, you can check out my Do You Twitter? post which provides a short introduction, a short discussion of the usefulness of Twitter, and a few resources for new users.

Shortly after that post, I realized there was a need for a Concise Guide to Twitter, so I published one, drawing heavily from some more exhaustive guides that needed a bit of updating.

In addition to discussing the fight at Beaufort High, I wrote this post after the fight to address the impact of Twitter and it’s usefulness as a news source.

I know this can all be a bit overwhelming, so don’t hesitate to give me a call or shoot me an email if you would like any more information or if I haven’t provided sufficient detail in this post.

Tagged as: Beaufort, Blogs, communication, livejournal, lorelle, nonprofit, nonprofit tech, parents, sea island presbyterian, Social media, Social network, social networking, tech consulting, tech guide, Tweet, TweetDeck, Twitter, typepad, user generated content, WordPress, YouTube