In July of 2009, my wife and I were blessed with a beautiful baby boy. Naturally our families wanted to be involved with watching our son learn and grow, however, the grandparents (8 of them to be exact) were geographically spread out. We needed a solution that would allow the grandparents, family, and friends to have access to pictures and the latest news — thus DaddyBlogging was born.

Mommy blogging has been around for a while and there are not as many daddy bloggers, but since I am the geek in this relationship, the blogging fell under my area of expertise. There are many solutions out there for bloggers: WordPress, Blogger, and MobileMe. Then there is having one’s own domain, which is what I have done. Along with help from YouTube and Blogger, I am able to access and publish content quickly and from almost anywhere where I have Wi-Fi or a cellular phone signal. Here is how I do it:

Chris Pirillo got me hooked up with GoDaddy when he gave out some discount coupons for registering a domain at $7.95 per year. I have been renewing with GoDaddy for three years now. I also take advantage of GoDaddy’s free hosting service. My out of pocket cost for my blog is $7.95 per year. You can use other services that have no cost, but there is a big advantage to using my name as my domain: anyone who can remember my name will easily remember my domain. This is well worth the negligible cost.

So now that I have a domain and free hosting, I can build a Web page. I can use 1000 plus applications for doing this, but I like doing things the easy way, so I have a Blogger account that publishes my content to my own domain instead of using a Blogger.com/yourbloghere address. I can access my Blogger account from anywhere. I used to use iWeb on my MacBook, but I found that my Web content was always tied to my MacBook, which I didn’t like. With Blogger I can use the Blogger interface or I can use the email address that I have with Blogger to upload content.

Publishing Pictures On The Go

As I mentioned above, I have an email address set up, so when my son is looking really cute, or my cat is where he isn’t supposed to be, I can snap the picture using my iPhone 3G and publish pictures instantly to my blog anywhere I have Wi-Fi or a 3G signal.

Publishing Pictures From An SD Card

The iPhone is great for pictures taken in good light and on the go, but sometimes, I need to publish a picture of decent quality. My father-in-law has a fancy camera and has a knack for catching great shots; he will email me a copy of the picture that he took and I will upload that to my blog, using Blogger. After logging into Blogger, I simply attach the picture and a brief description and then hit send. Within seconds, the picture is accessible to the world via my domain.

Publishing Video

Unfortunately, I have not mastered being able to do this one on the fly due to file sizes and the ability to send via email to Blogger in an acceptable format. But for the videos, I usually have to edit them to make sure they are quality clips and no longer than 45 seconds or so, so I don’t bore my readers. I use iMovie on my Mac to do this, and the nice thing about iMovie is that I can upload directly to my YouTube account. Once my file is on YouTube, I simply copy the HTML from YouTube and then log into Blogger and paste. Blogger then sends that video to my domain to be accessed by anyone who cares to watch.

I am sure there are many other solutions, but this is the one that works for me. My solution is easy to work with, I can upload some content remotely, and the price is low. The only caveat to the free hosting is that I get a weird GoDaddy ad that is partially obscured by a Blogger bar at the top of the page on my domain, but I can live with this minor error for the savings I gain in not paying for hosting.

Clinton Middleton is a full-time registered nurse, working in emergency care, a full-time daddy, and a part-time technology enthusiast. He looks for ways to leverage technology to make tasks easier and more efficiently performed at both home and work.