Treasured Valley

Really, it’s as easy as 1-2-3. It’s free, it doesn’t require that much of a time commitment and it can be endlessly gratifying.

One thing we can always use more of in the Treasure Valley is more people with blogs — it’s a fun way to talk about the things that you like and it’s always fun to engage with others in the community. If you have a particular passion be it wine, beer, movies, politics, religion, hiking, biking, food, gardening or whatever, you should start blog about it, because…well, we want to hear about it. It’s a great way to share with others something that you’re passionate about and if you go the anonymous route it’s also a great way to get things off of your chest — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Don’t worry about any complexity, it’s easy (I mean, look, I did it). All you need to do is to choose which free service you want, pick a name, set it up and type yourself into a blogging frenzy. Worry about custom URLs, graphics and all of that stuff later…set one up, get a feel for it and see if you enjoy it — don’t worry about being an expert right off the bat, you’ll learn how to embed links, add photographs as you go.

There are quite literally hundreds of platforms out there to set up a blog on, but for simplicity’s sake, try out one of these five:

WordPress.com (http://www.yourdomain.wordpress.com):

Blogger (http://www.yourdomain.blogger.com):

Typepad: (http://www.yourdomain.typepad.com):

Posterous (http://www.yourdomain.posterous.com):

Tumblr (http://www.yourdomain.tumblr.com)

For the record, I started off using Blogger, moved to Scoop, then to Typepad and finally to self-hosted WordPress.org. Each has its own benefits, but for what I’m doing now, self-hosted WordPress.org (different from .com) seems to work out the best for me. Although TreasuredValley.com 2.0 will most likely be on something completely different — at least I hope.

Let’s see if we can get 10 new blogs set up here in the Treasure Valley, I’m not saying that that they will all stick around but let’s see if 10 readers can set up a new blog and at least try it out. When you set up your blog please let me know in the comments or send me a message here so I can add it to my feeds and link up to it in the appropriate TREASURED VALLEY daily feature.

And if you don’t want to set up your own blog but you still want to write about a topic consider being a contributor to TREASURED VALLEY, just send me a message pitching what you want to write about.