Lessons for setting up a new blog

I've learnt two important lessons in the first 48 hours of having my personal blog.
1. Set it up properly
2. Don't delay setting it up

So I've setup my new blog and - irony of ironies - haven't been able to achieve one of my targets: blogging each day.

I setup the blog and immediately wanted to start writing. The 123-reg free blog system was really good but had a significant drawback: I couldn't change the permalinks. Permalinks are the way that the URL for the post is generated. This is a key part of search engine optimisation. Therefore, I decided to move my blog to wordpress.If I had changed them midway through, it would have caused 404 errors - which no one likes - where links that people clicked on would have produced error pages.

As a result of moving the blog, I was without it for 24 hours 'whilst the DNS propagated' - as the internet still takes some time to catch up and tell all of the world's computers of the new website's position.

My other useful lesson was that there were two posts on other blogs that I had something to contribute to. If I'd set my blog up properly in the first place (or just a couple of days earlier) I would have been able to start building hyperlinks to my site. Because of the problems, I couldn't.