I’ve seen lots of bloggers break longer pieces into separate entries, or chapters, if you will. Subsequent chapters would all begin with a link back to chapter 1, as it’s entirely likely that web searches would turn up results from all over your blog. You could, in fact, have a table of links in each part that acts as a table of contents.

The thing about a garden-variety, do-it-yourself website is that you might find it’s not as “plugged-in” or connected as is a dedicated blogging site. It also may lack some of the writing, editing and publishing tools that are standard fare for blogging sites. You can build all this stuff into a website if you wish, but aside from it being an interesting academic challenge, what would be the point?

OTOH, I’m talking out a my butt here, as they say. Robert knows *way* more about this than I do, and it sounds like Tom has considerable experience with blogging as well.

I’m thinking of a web site wherein I had topics such as “Tailoring your intervention to particular personality types” where I explain the way I would approach different kinds of people. That would have chapters and be fairly long.

And then I’d hope to have someplace where people could make observations, or ask how to handle Uncle Harry or their kid. “Uncle Harry” would be one thread, “Little Johnny” would be another. So would a general conversational part “Interventions are a waste” and “Why do you hate people who drink” and things like that.

I don’t know what would do that. Unlike HZ, each section would have a “hard”, unchanging part, where I, right or wrong, pontficate. Under that would come the various discussions.

Blog, web site, I don’t know. I do know I don’t have the energy to create anything complicated – I just want to offer people hope and show possibilities through dialogue.

But a blog is just a specific example of what we call a “content management system”, and good blogging software can be used to build all kinds of web sites, and the finished result doesn’t have to look like a blog.

It could look like a forum. The HabitableZone is built on WordPress blogging software. I’m building university courses on WordPress, and then it looks like a “learning management system”.

So go for a blog, and you’ll get a web site.

wordpress.com is run by the developers of the WordPress software, and they have free starter accounts that are probably all you need. There are other blogging platforms that are probably just as good, but all else being equal, if you go with some version of WordPress, you’ll be able to call on me for help with it. And if some future incarnation of the Zone provides blogs for members (hint: it will), then I’ll be able to transfer your data from your blog into the Zone.

Tom’s blog is at wordpress.com. You should ask him for more information about them.

A different way to go if you want to have your own domain name (bowser.com is taken, but they’ll sell you an emailaddress@bowser.com for $35) is to use the self-service web site “builder” package that comes with almost all domain name registrations (probably what you remember from 20 years ago). You sign up for web site hosting for something on the order of $5/month, and the package usually includes all kinds of free software. There’s the aforementioned “builder”, and usually the package includes WordPress. No matter where you go, there you are.

The benefits of hosting your own web site aren’t as compelling as they used to be. There are lots of alternate ways to publish content on the Net these days, and the costs range from cheap to free. It’s not like the good old days of the DotCom Boom, when my answer would typically be something like “well, let’s see, that’ll be $10,000 to set it up, then $700/month hosting, plus bandwidth charges”. There’s very little gold left to be mined in that vein.