This blog is designed to meet the requirements of NET 11 The Internet – Communications offered by Open Universities Australia and conducted by Curtin University of Technology. The content will mainly consist of learning outcomes, personal thoughts regarding my learning experiences (good , bad and ugly) as well as useful and relevant links to resources found on the internet.

I have never tried to create a blog, I have read blogs by others on my favourite subject (cycling) see for example Blogscrement. I have also had a quick look at some of the blogs set up for this unit.

Before I started this exercise , a decision had to be made as to what software to chose. Accordingly I googled blog software. Sitepoint, a site I was familiar with from NED 11 reviewed WordPress. What I like about the review was the suggestion that it was very easy to install and secondly it was open source software. I have a belief that the internet should be accessible for all and that proprietary code should be avoided where possible.

There are many articles on the blogger versus wordpress “war” but in summary it seemed to me that it was a matter of personal preference.   If I had Google mail and subscribed to Picasa I would probably have used Blogger, but as I utilise  Flickr and actually own my own domain name, I decided to try WordPress.

On the whole I fould it easy to set up and start using. I managed to work out how to write and edit a post as well as to customise the image used as a heading without reading any FAQ or utilising the forum. I did eventually decide to keep the default image as some of my photos were not quite right to use at this point of time. This will change as the blog develops.