Your World, Online: Setting Up a Weblog

Your World, Online: Setting Up a Weblog: ". How do I set up a Weblog of my own? Do I need to have my own server to store it on? A. Weblogs, or blogs, are personal journals whose authors make them available online to the public. A Weblog is updated as often as the writer decides and can include photographs and links to other sites around the Web. There are different ways to create a Weblog, and you do not need your own file server. For those who want a simple Weblog and do not have a file server to store it on, several sites offer templates and serve as free hosts, for example, LiveJournal (www .livejournal.com) and Blogger (www.blogger.com). For more complex blogs with more customizable features and fewer advertisements, both sites also offer services for $50 a year or less. You can also buy desktop software programs to create a Weblog. Radio UserLand sells for $39.95 and works with Windows and Macintosh systems. Users receive 40 megabytes of space to store their blogs on the software company's servers. A trial version can be downloaded at radio.userland.com, and UserLand Software has a Weblog information site at www.weblogs.org, which itself is a Weblog about Weblogs. For diarists with their own Web server accounts, Movable Type has free software for creating a Weblog at www.movabletype.org, and Fog Creek Software has a free version of its CityDesk program for Windows at www.fogcreek.com/citydesk. A cautionary note: Remember that anyone on the Web can read your blog, so be mindful of how much personal information you make available. Q. When I visit a Web site that has a lot of photographs, the text always appears properly, but the pictures are sometimes missing, with a blank spot with a red X where they should be. What causes this? A. The red X usually indicates that a photo file is extremely slow to load or is unable to load from the"