This is my first attempt to create a blog which will be used to record the research I will be undertaking in support of my studies for a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Photography at Coleg Llandrillo in North Wales. As a complete novice, the first challenge has been to work out how a blog functions and how to then set one up so if you are reading this online, I have at least achieved that. The software packages available are relatively easy to navigate and I watched several 'youtube' videos before starting which varied significantly in quality and in how hard they try to convince you that their approach and to use the discount code they provide to give you a better deal with their preferred site hosting option (and thereby provide them with some income).
The most helpful of them explained the differences between using one of the packages provided by 'Wordpress.com' (with a domain name and hosting by them) or using 'Wordpress.org', the original creators of the software (having sourced a domain name and web hosting from one of the many independent providers e.g. 'Bluehost', 'HostGator' or 'Sitebuilder'). As it has taken me about two hours to get this far, any of the video tutorials which claim to get you up and running in ten minutes need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. I finally opted to use 'Wordpress.com' as although there are limitations with their 'free' package, everything needed is available on the one site. Most of the independent providers do however link directly to 'Wordpress.org' and seem to take you through the process one step at a time with very similar initial set-up costs to the cheapest 'Wordpress.com' package.Getting up and running was initially quite challenging due to the variety of options for customising the appearance of the blog and organising the content but learning to use the Wordpress interface is no different from learning any other software package - it simply requires experimentation and perseverance until a reasonable approximation of the desired appearance is achieved. As the main potential area of interest for my research project are likely to be around the interfaces between analogue and digital imaging technologies (hence the title for the blog), this has been a useful learning experience.