Thankfully, there's an easy solution.

Though some websites such as Geocities or Freewebs offer free website services, if you are absolutely confused by internet and balk at notion of having to learn HTML all at once, there's a really easy solution that just about anyone can do: blogging.

What's blogging you ask? A blog is a web log, or a place to publish text and images in spirit of a journal or an online report. Many use it for just that purpose, but a blog can be just about anything you want it to be, and for all practical purposes, it is a web page...and you can blog absolutely free.

The best way to go is blogger, where you can set up a free blog and choose from a number of very stylish templates.

First things first, you need somewhere to deposit your thoughts. You need to decide how you want to attack this. Your choices are: - To use a blog hosting service such as eBloggy (http://www.ebloggy.com) or BlogEasy (http://www.blogeasy.com). - To host a blog yourself on a server of your own choice.

Both options have their free or paid subsections. The blog hosting services mentioned here are free but there are paid services out there. MSN now offer ‘Spaces’, which are essentially blogs attached to your MSN account and may be of interest to some. Web hosting can also be free or paid but you’ll find it difficult to find a free service that will offer you features you’ll need to run a blog backend. One place to look is your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that may offer some free web space. This web space often contains as many features as many professional web hosting packages although it offers less space. Blogs tend not to take up a whole lot of room so this shouldn’t be a problem. The advantage of hosting your own blog over using a service is that you have greater control over how it works, how it looks etc. You also don’t have to put up with there being ads on your page (unless you find some free hosting which usually has advertising put at top of your site). The downside is that it can be a bit more complicated to function.

If you’re going to host your own blog you’ll need to find yourself a blog backend. This is program that runs on server and allows you to upload new journal entries while allowing other people to view them. You’ll have to either choose a backend that fits within your web hosting package’s limits or a hosting package that meets backend’s requirements. The general requirements are PHP and MySQL but you can get some backends that work solely with PHP or even Java. It’s important to make sure that you can change read/write permissions of PHP files on your server (using CHMOD or an equivalent, talk to your host—they’ll know what you’re talking about). There’s a nice breakdown of many different beckends and their features and requirements that can be found at, http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm. I personally use Pivot because it doesn’t require MySQL and it has RSS distribution, which is nice.