SLCC Genealogy Course -- Blogging Project

Tonight I started on my Blogging Project. First I went to the Utah Genealogical Society web site. I logged in, because I am a member, and went to the archives of the virtual chapter meetings. I watched the February virtual chapter meeting (webinar) called Using Tools and Organization for Creating a Valuable Family History Blog presented by James L. Tanner, author of the Genealogy's Star blog. He gave this same presentation at RootsTech 2014 a few weeks before the UGA Virtual Chapter meeting on Thursday February 6, 2014. I attended the RootsTech presentation and was very impressed. I wanted to hear it again and I am glad that I did. It "used up" 1 1/2 hours of my 6 hours. :) There was an excellent syllabus for the RootsTech presentation which I downloaded and printed from the RootsTech 2014 web site. The presentation was number RT 1061.
Here are some things I considered as I watched the presentation tonight. 
Why do I want to have a blog? It is a rather major time commitment, so I need to know why. What are my goals? I want to share my research and information. I want to preserve my family history. I want to preserve my research methodology and sources and citations for those who will come after me. I want to create a valuable resource that I can use. All these things are important to me, so that is why I want to create a better blog.
I considered adding more ways to share my blog and several add-ins and gadgets that I can implement on my blog. I definitely want to have a Google search function. And I definitely want to have the index function. I want to look for a newer more attractive template.
Before I heard James Tanner's presentation I was considering switching to WordPress and a paid site. I thought it would be more professional. But now I can see that he is doing a wonderful job with Blogger and so are several other top 40 Genealogy blogs. Blogger is quite a bit easier for me to use, because I am familiar with it. I have also used WordPress, but I have much more to learn about it. And Blogger is free!
James Tanner also made the point that if you write your blog posts in Microsoft Word there is a lot more formatting. Writing in the blog itself is simpler and even easier to make into a book. In fact, James Tanner recommends a blog as a good first step to writing a book.