Blapril

The Cutting Room Floor Post

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My Appearance in Astral Chain

This morning is technically part of my weekend, and as such I contemplated following “holiday rules” and ignoring a post. However since we are in the middle of Blapril that might set a bad precedent for the various participants. Instead this morning you are going to get a random assortment of blurbs that are sorta left on the cutting room floor. These are things that I don’t necessarily want to devote an entire post to, but still have things to say. For example here is a picture that my friend Storm sent me from Astral Chain because apparently in that universe I am a Toilet Fairy. I can’t say it is a profession that I would have chosen for myself, but I am also not going to fight it terribly hard. I should probably play Astral Chain at some point because it is either going to be right down my alley or I will thoroughly reject it… because I am not sure there will be much of a middle ground.

New Playstation 5 Controller Design

Unlike Microsoft, Sony keeps unveiling their system bit by bit… and up until this point we really didn’t have much to go on as far as stylings for this next generation. However if this controller is any indication for what the final system might look like I am completely on board. This controller reminds me of you took the vibe of Tron Legacy and combined it with the Robotic designs from Portal. It also looks like maybe just maybe they are making a design that is a little bit friendlier to larger hands. There is a problem I have with the Dualshock 4 that my pinky fingers fall asleep when I am gripping the controller because I am sorta having to tuck them back up and under to get all of my fingers on the sides. I’ve written about my favorite large hand controller designs before, but this is definitely a thing for me personally. Thanks to growing up on movies like Bladerunner… this is what I expected the future to look like and I am thankful to Sony for starting to realize that cyberpunk reality. If the new console is inexplicably orb shaped they will even score more points with me.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands Alpha

The Friends and Family Alpha for World of Warcraft Shadowlands started this week, and like I assumed I did not get an invite. There was a time when I was pretty much getting these like clockwork, but I feel like I have said enough bad stuff about the company and the game that I am no longer considered friend nor family. All of that said I am excited it has started because I actually do love World of Warcraft spoiler season. I have a weird stance on spoilers in general, because they actually enhance my enjoyment of the product and hype me up about it. Now I tend to try avoiding some of the story beats, but the various world building products that start leaking out and how the systems are going to work are absolutely candy for me to gobble up. On one hand I have to admit that I would have liked being invited because it would have been fun to test out the various classes. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to burn myself out on a game before it even releases as I have done a few times in the past. I have a lot of hope going into this expansion that it will start to turn the game as a whole around. Having been back the last few weeks I am remembering how fun it is at times, and how much enjoyment I get out of piddling around. The corrupted item system however can die in a freaking fire.

Destiny 2 on Google Stadia Fake Screenshot

Another thing that happened this week that is worth talking about is that Stadia went open to the public. Everyone can sign up for 2 months of free Stadia Pro to get in and kick the tires. The problem I have seen so far is that the tires might fall off. Stadia appears to be actively blocking any third party capture solutions, including even GeForce experience and as such you have to rely on their baked in screenshot functionality accessible by hitting F12. The problem with this is that the above image bears no resemblance to the image that I actually saw on the screen while playing the game. I am guessting that the image is saved on the server side where the fidelity is significantly better. That image is perfectly fine and if the game looked like that while playing I would consider this a rousing success visually at least. What the game-play instead looks like is more akin to what I remember playing Destiny 1 on the PS3 felt like.

The nail in the coffin for me however is how the game performs. I specifically chose Destiny 2 just like I did when I was testing out GeForce Now because it was a game that I have deep experience playing and understand how it is supposed to be performing. I opted not to connect this up to my cross save so that I could experience the New Light intro. In it you pick up the Khvostov auto rifle, a weapon known for its smooth handling and honestly probably the ideal starter weapon. Trying to aim down the sights and take out Fallen felt like my mouse was jumping all over the place constantly. The cursor movement felt exceptionally jerky and random making it near impossible for me to stomach playing through even this first mission. I’ve stopped and restarted it a half dozen times, and for reference I am using the chrome based web client over a wired gigabit connection straight into my router. This machine has full access to my 350 Mbit internet connection, which should be more than cromulent for playing 1080p gaming.

Contrast that to my experience with the same game on GeForce Now and I am questioning how viable Stadia is for pretty much any sort of shooter going forward. I am going to play some of the other game that are less demanding on fine motor skill and see how they work out. However in playing GeForce Now it was not that different than playing over Parsec streaming to my desktop upstairs on the same LAN. The sad thing is… I am pretty close to their ideal customer given that I play games remotely all the freaking time. However the end result just did not feel good… and it could be that the server is just overloaded at this point. However it felt the same at 10 pm at night as it did this morning at 8 am… which should have significantly different bandwidth footprints. Not my jam but I am thankful that I did get to play with it in person.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Well folks it is finally here, and as I write this I am hearing the soundtrack playing in the background. I am weird and have all of my consoles connected to a capture card instead of directly into the television. So that means while I am playing games I am actually doing so through the Elgato HD Capture software window maximized. It works for me because it allows me to capture footage directly while playing and just hit the print screen key in order to take screenshots. Anyways all of that nonsense aside I have Final Fantasy 7 Remake up and ready to go and a day off work to play it. However I have to admit now that I do… I am thinking about playing other things. Seven was not the pinnacle game for me that it was for so many others. I originally played it on the PC, and really the game that blew me out of the water was Final Fantasy 3/6 depending on when it was released. The first Final Fantasy game I played on the Playstation was the 8th, and as a result I probably have more affinity for it than I do this one. That said I do plan on playing it this weekend, just not sure how far I will make it.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Soundtrack

With that we bring to a close my random list of topics. I am once again going to spin this around to Blapril for a moment, because quite often you are going to find yourself in this situation where you have a bunch of small bits of content that don’t really fit together. It is perfectly fine to do one of these cutting room floor posts where you clear out a bunch of thoughts that are disconnected. It helps greatly to break things up with images and captions like I have done, or to at least use headings to help the readers shift between them. As time passes and you get more used to creating content on the fly, you can pretty much take any assortment of things and make it work. My readers may however disagree with me and tell me that these sort of posts are crap, but they have always been a crutch that I could fall back on when I didn’t have much else to talk about.

Making Room for Writing

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Hey Folks! It’s that time again, time for another Blapril post. Monday I talked about the challenges of figuring out a name, and yesterday was a dive into various free hosting options. This morning I am going to talk about what I consider to be the third most important thing about blogging… making room in your life for writing. Best intentions are exactly that right up until the point you actually set forth with a plan to make them happen. If you are going to be writing more often then you need to figure out when exactly you are going to do this thing. “Whenever I get around to it” generally means that you are going to post any time you have a burning idea and then extremely intermittently in the times in between those moments of genius. This is an extremely relevant message coming from me who has had a wild ride as far as posting regularity goes.

The Grand Experiment

If you look at the early days of this blog you will find that I had no semblance of a schedule. I might post three days in a row and then it could be a month or two until my next post. The problem with this sporadic nature is that you are setting yourself up for frustrations. Firstly your readers won’t know when to expect new content and as a result folks will turn up when they happen to think about it… which is essentially never. If you are waiting for a moment of genius before you put keys to virtual paper, then there is the thought that surely some other more regular site would be talking about it. I would have torrents of readers when something of mine got elevated to Massively or WoW Insider but the rest of the time it was pretty much crickets because I was doing nothing to keep regular readers.

As a point of reference there are 152 posts that occurred during the first four years of my blog or an average of 38 posts per year during 2009-2013. In the time since then I have written 2150 averaging 307 posts a year in the seven years in between. What changed is that on April 26th of 2013 I wrote a post entitled The Grand Experiment, in which I pledged to write something every single day and change the way I interacted with my blog. I had created this false assumption about my blog and blogging in general that every single post had to be important. So to get me over this I just started writing anything that came to my mind every single day and continued this for roughly three and a half years. There were days when it was harder than others but I kept at it and kept pushing forward and making new posts until I became numb to the constant nagging sense of doubt, disillusionment and feelings of complete and total inadequacy.

Making Room for Writing

The only way this ever worked is because I set forth and made space in my life for it to happen. I had gotten into the habit of hanging out each morning upstairs in my office while I drank my morning cup of coffee. During this time I would either fall down a youtube hole or log into whatever my MMORPG of choice at the time was and grind out a few dailies. It was completely frivolous time that could be used for other purposes but I ultimately never did anything with it. I decided that I could sacrifice this hour of time and instead focus on writing a blog post every single morning. Clearing this space in my life for usually uninterrupted writing time gave me the room that I needed to write every single day and honestly I found that this unnatural time boxing actually made me more productive.

I knew that I could not screw around because from the time I planted my butt in my chair at 6 am, that come 7 am I had to publish whatever I managed to cobble together during that time. Often times the actual writing of the post happened from about 6:30 am to 7 am because I would inevitably spend some time trying to “find my muse” for the morning and checking in on what was going on in the world. So not only could I pull a post out of thin air, I could in theory do it in about thirty minutes. The process actually began way earlier than that at 5:30 when I pulled myself out of bed and hopped in the shower. While warm water cascaded over my body waking me up, I would start thinking about what I was going to write that morning. My ENTIRE morning started revolving around what I could do to make sure I met my deadline and got some new piece of content out that morning. One simple act set this all in motion, and that was clearing some space for the writing itself to happen.

Figuring out Your Schedule

Blaugust and Blapril as well is at its core an examination of what it takes to create regularly serialized content. Readers love predictability and I don’t mean predictable themes or topics, but the ability to predict the arrival of new content. If you set a schedule to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday then your readers will return on those days because they know there is new content to consume. If your schedule is instead whenever you feel like it, then you have given your readers no queues as to how often they should be prepared to receive new content. Sure RSS readers are a way of getting around this but after the death of Google Reader this is less and less of a reliable source of traffic. Most of your readers are coming in either organically through search or arriving deliberately. The later of those is made up through those hitting your site directly or from your various syndication efforts on social media (which is why I stressed the importance of camping those names on various platforms in day one).

Blaugust was never about trying to get people to adopt the nonsense rigor that I kept for three years of posting every single day. Instead it was an attempt to show them that after having posted every single day in a month that they could easily maintain a more rational schedule of every week day, every other day or something similar. It was a celebration of being able to do something really hard which in turn made doing something less difficult seem easier. However I am not really sure if this has ever worked quite in the way I wanted it to. All of that aside the best way to build a regularly community of readers is to post your content on a reliable and predictable schedule. There are folks that have been concerned about me in the few cases when I didn’t get a post out before 8 am, because most days you could almost set your watch based on when I was going to publish content.

Give Yourself Room to Fail

Ultimately I backed off of the posting every single day thing because it seemed extremely oppressive to never let the ball touch the ground. Like I said some days were extremely easy, and the content flowed through my fingertips into the keyboard like someone else was writing it. There were other days when everything went wrong and I felt a growing sense of dread as the clock ticked closer and closer to seven and I still didn’t have anything workable. Those are the days now when I post a quick note to twitter and apologize that there won’t be a post that day and the move on with my life. I have given myself permission to fail and then dust myself off the next morning and keep going like nothing happened.

In the early days of the blog it felt like each time I had a major absence, that I needed to come up with some great post as a way of saying sorry to the people who were still reading me. Either that or I felt like I needed to write a treatise on what exactly happened that kept me from actually churning out content. When you are posting regularly it becomes easier to just note that new content won’t be coming and move on with whatever real world tragedy has kept you from dedicating the time needed that day. Your readers are also more forgiving because they know this single lapse is the exception rather than the rule and they know they will be able to expect fresh content the next day. You have to find the rhythm of content creation that fits the pace of your life and when you do… after a few months you will find it becomes second nature.

Blogging as Therapy

One last bit that I am going to talk about this morning is something I have hinted at before. On most days it feels like I am sitting down and writing to an empty room. I occasionally am shocked when someone reaches out to me that they read something I wrote, or when one of my posts gets picked up by another website. The secret of my blog is that I am doing this as much for my benefit as I am for yours. Sitting down and dumping my thoughts to the digital page each morning is in many ways a form of therapy as I order my thoughts and arrange them into a neat little pile that forms a paragraph. I appreciate that you the reader exists as part of this, because it gives me a reason to keep doing this. However if tomorrow I decided to stop blogging entirely, I would probably turn around and start a private journal to fill this apparently needed role in my life.

There are going to be people who arrive on your doorstep because of some grand content that you created. There are going to be people who arrive because they happen to love whatever it is that you are into at a time. However if someone stays with you for years, or in my case over a decade… they are going to do so because they are interested in you as a human being. When you transition to that phase in your blog you have a lot of freedom to talk about whatever happens to be bothering you regardless if it happens to fit neatly into your theme. I’ve always tried to be open to my readers and share a lot of my life with them, albeit often times anonymized to protect friends and family. I want to be fundamentally honest and in that honesty comes expected truth that spills out between the cracks. There are times when I am working through a thought process and come to some fundamental realization about myself that I had never landed upon before. So if you allow it your blog can operate on levels that your readers may never quite glean, but can at the same time help you immensely.

Somewhere to Write

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Welcome to the second day of Blapril postings and with it comes a batch of new sign-ups to join in this process. I really should probably stop even jokingly referring to them as victims, because we really want this to be a joyful experience for all involved. At the time of writing this we are up to 38 members of this giant band of adventurers and I couldn’t be happier to share the journey. If you want to keep tabs on all of the new sign-ups I am intermittently updating the list that can be found on the Blaugust Media Kit page. I decided yesterday that this makes a lot more sense than trying to post a new list every single day.

Free as in Beer

Yesterday I talked at length about what I consider to be the most important step of creating a blog, which is figuring out what to call it. Today I am going to focus on carving out some real estate for you to hang out a shingle and start writing. Essentially you can divide your options into two clear camps, those that you are hosting yourself and those that you are having someone else host for you. Even that I guess is a little less than clear because technically if you rent server space and install your own site on it, you are technically getting someone else to host it. However for the sake of this discussion today I am going to focus on the options that are completely free and allow you to be writing within minutes of signing up.

WordPress

WordPress is effectively the 500 pound juggernaut in the blogging world. It is fast and easy to get signed up and comes with a pretty solid blog reader as well. If you manage multiple sites it also allows you to set up a scenario where you can manage and update all of them through a single interface. The negative however is that all of the freedom to be gained through using WordPress comes with the self hosted version which can be found at WordPress.org. WordPress.com is the turnkey solution that allows you to push all of the hassle onto someone else, but in order to get many of the features you might want it requires a paid plan. However in the free version you get a <yournamehere>.wordpress.com domain name and the ability to start posting instantly.

I’ve been a proponent of WordPress.com for years as a first blogging experience in part because you are going to out grow whatever first platform you start on. I personally started on Blogger and migrated to self hosted WordPress because I was limited in my ability to do the things I wanted to do. Knowing this the transition between WordPress.com to self hosting the software from WordPress.org is extremely smooth and there are lots of tools baked into the default software to ease this transition. I am a big fan of starting with the free version of WordPress because it is going to give you a lot of flexibility moving forward when you decide that your free site isn’t enough for your current tastes.

Blogger

Next up I introduce you to Blogger.com the blogging application hosted and maintained by Google. The nice bit about this tool is that if you are already a denizen of google, you can just pick up and start integrating with the various google tools immediately using an account you are already familiar logging into and is hopefully protected by two factor authentication. The negative for me at least is that it is hosted by Google and has essentially been in “maintenance mode” for years with the last features being added in 2017 and a bunch of things slowly deprecated and removed in 2019. The killer feature of this blogging platform is the way that it manages your blogroll, and this used to be even more killer when it integrated with Google Reader, which was unfortunately sunset in 2013 which was a dark time for the blogosphere.

The folks that love blogger really seem to love it, and like I said I started out my blogging life with a small blogger that will never see the light of day. What I found frustrating about it is that it seemed like I lacked the level of granular control that I personally wanted from a blogging experience. I think for others that is more of a positive because they ultimately place those design decisions in the hands of a limited selection of prebuilt themes and just get to the business of writing. My biggest concern is that Google loves to cancel its products, and I feel like they have been gunning for Blogger for quite some time originally trying to turn Google Plus into the new blogging platform. It has not happened but given that it does not seem that they are actively working on the platform, I am not sure that the future does not see this site closing down.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a strange platform but one that bears mentioning. It is among the most straightforward platforms for just getting in and writing about something and offers a lot of clean mobile options if you want to blog on the go. It is also an excellent platform if you want to do a picture blog or post your artwork, because it is very image forward in the way that people consume content. I personally find it a bit lacking when it comes to writing anything long form, and while I syndicate to the platform I think it does a generally horrible job at actually conveying my posts. I think Tumblr works best when you are wanting to use it like a Long form Instagram.

The main reason I bring it up however is its sheer simplicity and its wide adoption by a number of specific subcultures of the blogosphere (and fandom). Much of what was formerly the Live Journal community found its sea legs over on Tumblr, and if your voice is targeted towards one of those communities then you are going to find a lot of traction and support (as well as a fair amount of drama) on Tumblr. Other than just syndicating my blog with WordPress tools to Tumblr, the only time I really use it is to log in and look at interesting pictures. I use it mostly to look at comic art and other fandom art, and Ammo from AggroChat and the creator of most of the artwork you see adorning this blog has a great Tumblr. It is definitely an option worth exploring if your vision is extremely image heavy.

Medium

Based on my understanding, Medium was created by one of the twitter co-founders and started its life as a way of sharing a longer form post on the micro-blogging platform similar to TwitLonger but with more “bloggerly” sensibilities. What it has morphed into over the years is a pretty solid blogging platform that is more focused on sharing articles than sharing an entire website with the public. Its content aggregation platform is focused on the type of content being shared and less on the author, but this allows for more organic discovery of your posts so long as people are searching on one of the various things you have tagged on. You don’t so much have a “site” with its own name, but you do have the ability to link to your Author page and that then links to all of the posts you have written.

I include this as an option because it has a really good writing platform with a bunch of very nice features. The end result is a very pretty and legible article, but you have to accept that you have very little control over the look at feel of it. You can insert images, create headers and even create those little call out snippets to drive interest in the piece, but you won’t be able to change font and formatting or shift away from anything other than the stark black on white theme. If you just want to write however and want your ideas to percolate among other peers that you may or may not know about then this might be a platform for you. That said it is really hard to actually create a brand that is anything other than you as a person on a platform like medium.

Get in and Get Writing

I am sure as soon as I post this, folks will chime in about other options. I largely focused on what I consider to be the four easiest options for getting up and running and blogging this afternoon. All of the above have options for getting started in minutes, and if you are late starting with Blapril they can serve as a bit of a jumpstart into blogging. As I said before you are likely going to outgrow your very first attempt at blogging, and like talking about an escape clause yesterday, my personal choice is WordPress just for the flexibility and ease of migrating elsewhere. However all of the above can serve you nicely as you begin this journey.

The Name is the Thing

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Yesterday technically was the first day of the Blapril event, but traditionally I don’t really make posts on the weekend apart from advertising podcasts. As a result today is my first day of Blapril celebrations. For those who have not been reading regularly and are curious what the hell Blapril is, then I direct you to the original announcement post as it has all of the relevant links and such. Over the weekend a bunch of folks signed up and the numbers are looking a bit better than they were. So lets get the business type stuff out of the way and here is the updated participants list. If I were smart I would throw this on the media kit page or something so I don’t have to keep re-posting it every single day like I have in the past.

As of the time of writing this we have 33 Participants, which is pretty great for just something that got announced last week. I am always super thankful to the level of support that I get each time I venture forth into madness. Like so much of this blog is me talking to myself and a form of therapy, but it is heartening to know that I have this community that is willing to help out and support me whenever I need it. Since we are living in a time where you should tell the people you care about that you love them and do so often, I am telling all of you in the Blaugust and now Blapril community that I love you dearly for your willingness to go down this rabbit hole each year.

The Most Important Decision

Now we get to the heart of today’s post. When you are thinking about starting a blog, you are confronted with so many different decisions that need to be made. It is very easy to go about this in the wrong order and start by setting up a website and going through the nuts and bolts of technically creating the blog. However of all of the decisions that you are going to be asked there is one that rises to the top of the heap. You need to know what to name your en devour because at least on some level this will ultimately dictate the type of audience you draw in from that point forward. Without maybe meaning to, your name is broadcasting a lot of things to people who come across in in a list of blogs or hopefully in organic google search results.

It goes so much further than just naming a thing however, you also need to make sure that you have a clear runway for whatever vision you are creating. Social Media right or wrong is inexplicably linked to blogging, and unless you have been around since a time before Twitter you are going to likely need an account on that platform as well as pretty much everything else that might someday rise to the realm of broad social relevance. So in choosing your name you not only want to try and pick something that you can easily get a meaningful domain name for, but also a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, an Instagram, a Twitch account or anything else that happens to become important at a later date. There is a reason why I am an early adopter of social media platforms, it isn’t necessarily because I LOVE social media… it is because I am effectively planting my flag in the ground and claiming a chunk of real estate for future usage.

Similarly you are not always going to get there first. So for me when I can’t get Belghast on whatever platform I am targeting I go for BelghastStern which is my consolation prize. So I think it is equally important to put some thought into your escape clause for when you can’t get your brand on a specific platform. I loathe the word “Brand” but sometimes you have to call things what they are because you are effectively building a brand for your blog, something that will ultimately make it recognizable and stand out from the crowd.

I Did This All Wrong

I’ve written a version of this post so many times now, but effectively I consider myself to have failed miserably at branding. Tales of the Aggronaut is so rarely what my blog is actually called. It is called Aggronaut.com or Belghast’s Blog by the vast majority of my readers or when someone from the media talks about it. Belghast is a brand that seemingly has worked because “it me” and I have landed on a name that is relatively uncommon. Tales of the Aggronaut was a thought experiment that served its purpose well until that purpose was no longer what I wanted to be writing about. Aggronaut was at the time what I thought to be a clever name for one who navigates or explores Aggro, aka the threat we are all trying to hold while tanking in an MMORPG.

So since this blog started it’s life as most specifically a Warrior tanking blog for World of Warcraft, the name made a lot of sense. However “Aggro” has another context, as someone who is aggressive or one who is being angered. I like to think I am a fairly chill and even keel sort of person, and in that context the name doesn’t really fit the sort of content that I create. We doubled down making it even worse when we started a podcast loosely connected to this blog and decided to call it AggroChat. Again the name gives the absolute wrong impression about the sort of content you are going to be consuming, but we stuck with it because this blog’s name was already established.

The name you choose will ultimately live with you for the life of your blog and will shape and dictate how people interact with it. Fortunately for me… Belghast became the bigger brand and while I should have probably gone with Belghast.com or Belgha.st but at the time of creating this blog I didn’t realize I would be the key factor in the equation. Coincidentally I own both of those addresses because like I said above I took the time to stake out that real estate for if I ever wanted to change my mind at a later date. There is part of you that needs to be thinking through all of the possible things that might impact you and coming up with a bit of a plan of how to deal with it. For every Ello that turns out to be nothing there is going to be an Instagram that ultimately blows up.

Your Exit Strategy

I’ve talked about this before, but I think it is extremely important to give yourself a way to shift things up as you yourself change as a person and as a writer. On April 17th, this blog will be 11 years old and during the last decade I have changed a lot as a person and most definitely as a writer. Like I said this blog started as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, something that I felt deep passion for at the time. While I am back in game right now, the last time I had played Retail WoW prior to that was November of 2018. Your tastes will change and with it you need to give yourself a way to change the blog to fit your new tastes without burning down all of your work and traction you have made in both the community and in google’s search engine nonsense.

I’ve pivoted a bunch of times throughout the course of this blog’s history, because while I don’t exactly think my name is great it is fairly non-descriptive and is not specifically focused on a particular game. This allowed me to stay a float and relevant until I finally reached the point where I became the brand and this thing I do just became another bit of data associated with it. You are going to outgrow whatever name you create for yourself. You are going to outgrow it more quickly however if you focus on being too specific. The best blog names are fairly general and can be highly malleable to fit whatever the writer wants to be talking about.

I’ve always particularly liked Wilhelm’s “The Ancient Gaming Noob” because it is evocative without actually pinning the writer down to it being a blog about a specific thing. Similarly I’ve always like names like Bhagpuss’s “Inventory Full” because it speaks to a conundrum that every gamer is familiar with and again allows for so much room to pivot freely between subjects. Another great name is Roger and his “Contains Moderate Peril“, because while sure it sounds “gamey” it absolutely does not have to be because so many things we engage with have a bit of peril in them. The idea being that all three of those names are memorable but have the sort of wiggle room in them that allows the author to shift them to what they need to be at that moment.

Check Availability

As I said before, it is important that you can adapt the brand you are building towards a bunch of different platforms. When coming up with a new name, make sure that someone else that you don’t want to be associated with is not already using it on the internet. You also do not want to go down the road of ending up with a copyright fight on your hands, so make sure it isn’t actually used in anything that could bring forth legal woes. Next see if the a domain is available, because even if you start on one of the free services with WordPress.com or Blogger.com, it is likely at some point that you may want to register a proper domain name. Lastly run down through the various social media services and see if you can get this name you are crafting or some reasonable facsimile at least.

Once you have found a name that resonates on all of the levels I have talked about today, then you probably do have something that will stand the test of time. Then you go about actually creating the site and getting it up and running. The name will serve as a guidepost as you create a logo, choose a theme, pick a color scheme, and all of the other assorted tasks that come with setting up a website for the first time. However all of this said… it isn’t the end of the world if you wind up with a name that doesn’t exactly suit your tastes years down the line. I have survived with what I feel is a lousy name for a blog just fine.