Stage 1What a Blog Is Now

A blog is a website where one person, or a small group, publishes dated pieces of writing called posts. The newest post usually sits at the top. Every post has its own permanent web address, so a reader can link to it, bookmark it, or find it again in ten years. Older posts gather into an archive, sorted by date and often by subject. Most blogs also publish a feed: a machine-readable list of recent posts that readers can follow in a feed reader without visiting the site at all.

That is the whole machine. Everything else — themes, plugins, newsletters, comment systems, visitor statistics — is optional equipment bolted on to a simple idea: a person writing in public, in their own place, over time.

What changed

In the early 2000s blogging was news. Newspapers ran features about it, publishers signed bloggers to book deals, and every media conference seemed to have a panel asking whether blogs would replace journalism. They did not, and the excitement moved on: to social networks, then to short video, then to newsletters.

The blog did not die. It became ordinary, which is a better fate. Today the form turns up under many names: a personal website with a "writing" page, a company's engineering notes, a newsletter whose issues also live on the web, a researcher's field notes, a cook's recipe archive that has quietly run for fifteen years. Some of the most useful writing on the internet sits on small sites that were never famous and never tried to be.

What has genuinely changed is the reason to do it. Twenty years ago people blogged partly because there was nowhere else to post. Now there is everywhere else to post, and the case for a blog is precisely that it is not everywhere else. It is yours. It can be found. It keeps.

Who this guide is for

Four readers, at once.

The complete beginner has something to say and no idea where to start. The main text is written for you, and the First Steps boxes tell you what to do this week, cheaply.

The practising blogger has a site, a few dozen posts and a stubborn problem: too few readers, too little time, or a platform that has started to feel like a trap. The serious writer has a book in mind, a paid newsletter, or a site that has outgrown the word hobby. Both will find what they need in the boxes marked For the Writer, which carry specifications, trade-offs and the realities of law and money.

The general reader, who simply likes a good story — how Indian writers taught themselves to publish online, or how years of writing can vanish in an afternoon — should head for the Sidebars.

How to use it

Part I is blogging anywhere in the world. It moves from what a blog is (Stages 1 and 2), through subject, voice and the craft of writing (Stages 3 to 6), to the practical machinery: platforms, domains, being found, images, comments, law and money (Stages 7 to 13).

Then comes the band this guide treats as the most important of all: keeping your writing alive (Stages 14 and 15). Writing published online is far more fragile than writing on paper, and most people discover this only after losing something. Read those two stages early, even if you skip everything else.

Part II is the Indian story: the blogosphere that grew in the 2000s, writing in Indian languages and scripts, the food, travel, literary and technology traditions, the move to newsletters and video, and India's rules on disclosing paid promotion.

The reference section at the end holds a glossary, further reading, and a sheet listing the images this guide calls for.

Stage 2Blogs, Social Posts and Newsletters

A short history

The personal websites of the mid-1990s were built by hand, and updating one meant editing code and uploading files. A few people kept online diaries this way; others kept running lists of interesting links. In 1999 two services, Blogger and LiveJournal, turned publishing into something closer to filling in a form. Software you could run on your own web space followed, notably Movable Type in 2001 and WordPress in 2003.

Two further inventions made blogs into a network rather than a scattering of sites. The feed, in the formats known as RSS and later Atom, let a reader subscribe to hundreds of blogs and see new posts in one place. Comments and blogrolls, lists of links to other blogs in a sidebar, let writers find and answer one another. By the middle of the 2000s there were communities of bloggers on almost any subject, in many languages, arguing across each other's sites.

From the late 2000s, social networks absorbed much of the casual posting. Why write a paragraph on a blog about a film when a line on a social network would reach more friends? Many blogs fell silent. Later, in the second half of the 2010s, email newsletters came back into fashion, carried by services that combined easy publishing with paid subscriptions.

Three ways to write in public

The three forms overlap, and many writers use all of them. They are still different tools.

Social media: good at attention, poor at keeping

A social post can reach more people in an hour than a blog post reaches in a year. It is also written into someone else's building. The platform decides who sees it, can change those rules without notice, and can suspend the account or close altogether. Old posts are hard to search and harder to link to, and a good thread from three years ago is, in practice, lost.

Newsletters: an inbox is not an archive

A newsletter arrives, which is its great strength. Readers do not have to remember to visit. The subscriber list is also a real asset, because on most services you can download it and take it elsewhere. But a newsletter's back issues usually live at the provider's address, not yours, and they are often poorly organised for someone arriving from a search years later.

The blog as home base

A useful habit, named by the independent-web community with the acronym POSSE — Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — is to put the full piece on your own site first, then send it out: as a newsletter, as a social post with a link, as a cross-post. The social platforms bring readers; the blog keeps the work. Stage 8 explains why the address it keeps it at should be yours.

Stage 3Finding a Subject and a Voice

The subject

The best subject for a blog is one you would keep writing about if nobody read it for a year. That is not a romantic test; it is a practical one. Almost every blog has a long, quiet beginning, and the writers who get through it are the ones interested in the subject for its own sake.

Expertise is not required. Honesty about your level is. A blog by someone learning to bake sourdough, clear about being a beginner, is useful and often more readable than one by an expert who has forgotten what was hard. What does not work is a beginner writing in the voice of an authority.

Three tests

The thirty-titles test. Can you write down thirty post titles on the subject, in one sitting, without strain? If you run dry at eight, the subject is too narrow or you do not yet know it well enough.

The material test. Do you have access to things other people do not: a place, a trade, a collection, a family archive, a job, a language, a long practice? The most distinctive blogs are built on material, not opinions.

The one-reader test. Can you picture a single person who would be glad to find this? Write for that person. A blog aimed at "everyone" is usually read by no one.

Narrow or broad

A narrow subject — the railway stations of one region, pressure cookers, a single poet — is easier to become known for, and search engines reward it because the site is clearly about something. A broad, personal blog — whatever interests the writer this month — is harder to grow and easier to sustain, because the writer never runs out.

A common and workable middle way is a clear main subject with room for occasional detours, labelled as such. Readers forgive a detour. They drift away from a site that has no centre.

Voice

Voice is simply what your writing sounds like when you stop imitating anyone. It comes from three things.

Specificity. Not "a lovely old café" but the café, its name, the chipped marble tables, what the tea costs. Specific detail is the fastest route to sounding like a person.

Plain words. Write roughly as you would explain the thing to a clever friend, then tidy it. If you would never say "leverage" out loud, do not write it.

Consistency. A reader should recognise your post before seeing the byline. That means a steady level of formality, a steady attitude to your subject, and the same "you" addressed each time.

Voice improves with volume. The first twenty posts of almost any blog sound stiffer than the next hundred.

Your name, or another

Writing under your own name builds a reputation you can carry into jobs, books and invitations. Writing under a pseudonym gives freedom to write about work, family or health, and some protection from harassment. Both are legitimate. Know, though, that a pseudonym is thin cover: identities leak through photographs, writing habits, domain records and friends. It is no protection at all from legal responsibility for what you publish (see Stage 12).

Stage 4Structure and Openings

Know the one thing

Before drafting, write the point of the post in a single sentence. Not the topic — the point. "Pressure cookers" is a topic. "A second-hand pressure cooker is safe only if you replace the gasket and check the valve" is a point. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not ready to write the post; you are ready to think about it, which is different work and worth doing in a notebook.

The sentence rarely appears in the finished piece in that form. It sits beside the draft as a test. Every paragraph either serves it or goes.

Shapes that work

Most good posts use one of a handful of shapes. Choosing one before you start saves a great deal of rewriting.

Most important first. The answer, the news or the verdict comes at the top, and the detail follows in descending order of importance. Newspapers call it the inverted pyramid. It suits reports, reviews and anything a reader might abandon halfway.

Steps. A problem, what you need, then numbered steps, then what can go wrong. It suits how-to posts, and the numbering is not decoration: readers use it to find their place.

Argument. A claim, the evidence for it, the strongest objection honestly stated, and why the claim survives it. It suits essays. Leaving out the objection is the most common reason an argument post persuades nobody who did not already agree.

Story. A scene, a complication, a turn, and what it meant. It suits personal writing and travel. The meaning should be earned by the story, not announced at the end.

Collection. Items gathered around a theme, each able to stand alone. It suits lists and roundups, and fails when the theme is only an excuse.

Openings

A reader decides in the first two or three sentences whether to continue. The opening's job is to put the reader inside the subject at once.

Start with the thing itself. A scene: the smell of the press, the queue at the counter. A claim: a clear statement the post will defend. A problem: the situation the reader is probably in. A striking fact, if it is true and you can source it. A question, occasionally, if it is one the reader genuinely has.

What to cut is easier to list. The weather report on the writer's own life ("It has been a busy few weeks"). The apology for not posting. The grand context ("Since the dawn of time, humans have cooked food"). The announcement ("In this post I will discuss"). Each can be deleted from almost any draft, and the post improves at once.

Middles

Reading on a phone changes the arithmetic. Keep paragraphs short, one idea each. Use subheadings that say something, so a reader skimming them gets the argument. Use a numbered list for steps and a table for comparisons. A block of 400 unbroken words that works on paper becomes a wall on a small screen.

Endings

Stop when you have finished. The last paragraph should add something — a consequence, a next step, a return to the opening scene with new meaning — rather than summarise what the reader has just read. "In conclusion" is a signal that the conclusion is unnecessary.

Stage 5Cutting, Editing Your Own Work and Honest Headlines

Draft hot, edit cold

Writing and editing use different parts of the mind, and doing both at once produces neither well. Write the draft quickly, without stopping to fix sentences. Then leave it — overnight if possible, for a week if the piece matters. The gap is not laziness. It is the only way to read your own work as a stranger would, and a stranger is who will read it.

What to cut

Almost every first draft is too long, and the cutting follows a predictable order.

• Throat-clearing. Opening sentences that warm up rather than begin (see Stage 4).
• Repetition. The same point made twice in different words, often once near the start and again near the end.
• Qualifiers. Very, really, quite, rather, just, actually, somewhat. Most can go without changing the meaning.
• Hedging stacked on hedging. One honest "probably" is useful. Three in a sentence is fog.
• The darling. The paragraph you are proudest of, which does not serve the point. Keep it in a cuttings file; it may be the start of another post.

A useful discipline is to try to cut a noticeable share of every draft — a paragraph in every page, say — and see whether anything is lost. Usually nothing is.

Editing in passes

Trying to catch everything in one reading catches little. Read several times, each time for one thing.

Checking facts

Every name, date, number and quotation in a post should be checked against a source you could point to. Spell names as their owners spell them. Where you quote, quote exactly and briefly, and say who said it. Where you cannot confirm a detail, write around it or say plainly that it is uncertain.

When you get something wrong, and you will, correct it visibly. Fix the post and add a dated note at the foot saying what was changed. Quietly rewriting a published post, especially one others have linked to or argued with, is a small dishonesty that readers notice.

Honest headlines

A headline makes a promise, and the post must keep it. The good headline says what the post is, specifically, in plain words: what it covers, for whom, and sometimes its verdict.

Avoid the tricks built to exploit curiosity: the headline that withholds the one fact the reader wants ("You won't believe what happened next"), false urgency, numbers that exaggerate ("50 tips" when there are twelve real ones and thirty-eight fillers), and questions whose honest answer is "no". They may earn a click. They also teach readers, and increasingly search engines, that your headlines cannot be trusted.

A note on addresses: the slug is often made from the first version of the headline. You can improve a headline after publishing, but leave the slug alone, or every existing link to the post breaks.

Stage 6Keeping Going: Cadence, Drafts and Burnout

Cadence

Cadence is how often you publish. The right cadence is the one you can keep in a bad month — during an illness, a deadline at work, a family wedding. A blog that publishes monthly for five years is worth far more, to readers and to search engines, than one that publishes daily for six weeks and stops.

Do not announce a schedule you have not already kept for a while. A promise of "a new post every Monday" broken in the third week does more harm than no promise at all.

The ideas file and the drafts folder

Ideas arrive at inconvenient times: on a bus, in the shower, halfway through someone else's article. Capture them all in one place — a notebook, a notes app, a single text file — and never trust memory to hold them.

Keep drafts in a way you can see at a glance: a title, a one-line status (idea, notes, draft, needs checking, ready), and the date you last touched it. Keep copies of drafts outside the blogging platform too. A draft that exists only inside one service is lost with it (see Stage 14).

The most useful thing a regular blogger can own is a small queue of two or three finished posts that are not tied to a date. They carry the blog through the weeks when nothing gets written.

Routine

Most people who keep blogging for years have a fixed slot: early morning, a lunch hour, Sunday afternoons. Separate the stages if you can. Draft on one day, edit on another, publish on a third. Each stage then gets full attention, and a bad day spoils only one of them.

Numbers

Visitor statistics are useful monthly and harmful hourly. The early months of almost any blog are quiet — a handful of visitors, many of them search engines' automated crawlers — and watching the count daily is a reliable way to give up. Check once a month: which posts people found, how they found them, and which ones they stayed to read. Then go back to writing.

Burnout

Burnout in blogging looks like dread when you open the editor, resentment of your own schedule, and posts that feel like homework. The usual causes are a cadence set too high, comparison with bigger sites, hostile comments (see Stage 11), and money: once a post has to earn, it stops being play.

The remedies are simple and underused. Lower the cadence. Write shorter posts. Change the form — a month of short notes instead of long essays. Or stop for a while, and say so in one plain sentence rather than an anguished apology. A paused blog loses little. Its archive goes on being found and read, and returning after a break is ordinary.

The body

Writing is sedentary work with physical costs. Set the screen at roughly eye level, keep wrists straight, and get up at least once an hour. Rest your eyes by looking at something distant every so often. If you develop pain, numbness or tingling in the hands, wrists, neck or back that does not settle with rest, stop and see a doctor or a physiotherapist. Do not write through it.

Stage 7Platforms: Hosted, Self-Hosted and Static

Choosing a platform feels like the first decision. It should be about the fourth, after the subject, the voice and a few drafts. It still matters, because it decides how much work the blog is to run, what it costs, and how easily you can leave.

Hosted

A hosted platform is a service run by a company. You sign up, choose a design and write; the company handles the servers, the software updates and the security. The best-known include WordPress.com, Blogger, Medium and Substack, the hosted service run by the makers of the Ghost software, and the general website builders that include a blog section.

Hosted platforms are the right start for most beginners. They are free or cheap, nothing breaks at three in the morning, and you can be writing within the hour.

The costs are less visible. You work within the company's rules and design limits. Free tiers may show advertisements you did not choose. Using your own domain often requires a paid plan. The company can change its terms, its prices or its direction, be sold, or close. And exports vary: some give you everything in a standard format, others give you your text and quietly leave the images behind.

Self-hosted

Self-hosting means renting space on a web server and installing blogging software on it yourself. By far the most common choice is the open-source WordPress software, the same software behind WordPress.com, but installed by you; Ghost can also be run this way.

You gain control: any design, any plugin, your own rules, and files and a database you can copy. You also gain a job. Software and plugins need updating, because out-of-date installations are the commonest way small sites get hacked. Backups are your responsibility (see Stage 14). Hosting costs money every year, and cheap plans can be slow or oversold.

Many web hosts offer one-click installation and automatic updates, which remove much of the burden. They do not remove the responsibility.

Static

A static site generator takes a folder of text files, usually written in Markdown — a plain-text format in which a line starting with a hash is a heading and a word between asterisks is emphasised — and turns them into finished web pages. You upload the pages to a host, and the host simply serves them. There is no database and no software running on the server to attack.

Static sites are fast, very cheap or free to host, and robust. Their greatest virtue, for the purposes of this guide, is that your writing already exists as plain text files on your own computer. That is the best possible starting point for preservation.

The price is technical. Setting one up means using a command line or at least editing configuration files, and features such as comments, contact forms and search need separate services. Writing a quick post from a phone is awkward.

The export test

Before committing to any platform, write a test post containing a heading, a link, a photograph and a caption. Publish it. Then use the platform's export feature and open what you get. Is the text there? Are the images there, or only links to images still on the company's servers? Is the date kept? Could another platform import it?

Ten minutes spent on this now can save a lost archive later.

Stage 8Your Own Domain

What a domain is

A domain is the name of a website: the part of the address such as yourname.in or pressurecookerdiaries.com. You never own a domain outright. You rent it, a year or several at a time, from a registrar, a company accredited to sell names. The registrar records your registration with the registry, the organisation that runs a particular ending such as .com or .in. A system called DNS then points the name at whatever server holds your site.

The name, the registrar and the web host are three separate things, and a surprising number of problems come from confusing them.

Why owning your domain matters

When your blog lives at a platform's address — a subdomain of the platform's own name — every link to your writing points at their property. If you leave, the links stay behind. If they close, the links die.

When your blog lives at your own domain, you can move from a hosted platform to self-hosting, or from one host to another, and the address stays the same. Every link anyone has ever made to your work goes on working. Search engines keep the reputation your site has earned. You can have an email address at the same name that survives a change of email provider.

It is the single most important step a blogger can take towards independence, and it costs, for common endings, somewhere between several hundred and a couple of thousand rupees a year (2026). Introductory prices are often lower; renewal prices are what you will actually pay.

Choosing a name

Short. Easy to spell when heard aloud. No hyphens or numbers that have to be explained. Your own name is the most durable choice, because it survives a change of subject; a subject name reads better but can trap you. Avoid other people's trademarks. Country endings such as .in are well suited to a blog with an Indian readership.

Registering it properly

• Register it in your own name, with an email address you control, not your web designer's or a friend's.
• Keep the registrar separate from the web host if you can. If the host fails or you fall out with it, your name is not held hostage.
• Turn on auto-renew, and pay with a card that will not expire soon. Better still, register for several years.
• Turn on the registrar's lock, which prevents the name being transferred away without extra confirmation.
• Protect the registrar account with two-factor authentication (see Stage 15).
• Accept the registrar's privacy protection where offered, so your home address is not published in public registration records.

Moving without breaking links

When you move a blog, the addresses of individual posts may change even if the domain does not. Set up permanent redirects, instructions that send anyone asking for an old address to the new one. Every competent platform and host supports them. A move without redirects throws away years of links in an afternoon.

Stage 9Being Found Without Gaming Search

How readers actually arrive

Readers find blogs in a few ways: through search engines, through links from other writers, through feeds and email subscriptions, through posts shared on social networks, and by word of mouth. For most blogs, search and links matter most over the long run, and both reward the same thing — writing that is genuinely useful to someone.

Search engine optimisation, usually shortened to SEO, is a large industry, and a good deal of what it sells is either obvious or harmful. The obvious part is worth doing. The harmful part is worth recognising.

What search engines want

Search engines try to send people to the page that best answers their question. Their methods change constantly, but the direction has been steady for years: towards pages that are original, clearly about their subject, written from real knowledge or experience, and pleasant to use. A blog built on real material (see Stage 3) is already most of the way there.

The honest basics

• Titles that say what the post is. The words a searcher would use belong in the title because they are the accurate words, not because they have been stuffed in.
• A short description. Most platforms let you write a sentence or two that search results can show. Write one.
• Readable addresses. A slug made of words, not numbers.
• Real headings. Use the platform's heading styles, not bold text, so the structure is visible to software.
• Alternative text for images. A plain description for readers who cannot see the picture, which also tells search engines what it shows.
• Links between your own posts. Point from new posts to older related ones. It helps readers and it helps search engines understand the site.
• A site that works on a phone and loads quickly. Compress large photographs; avoid heavy decorations.
• A sitemap and the webmaster tools. Most platforms generate a sitemap, a list of your pages for search engines. The major search engines offer free tools, such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, where you can register your site and see which searches bring people to it.

What not to do

Do not repeat keywords unnaturally. Do not buy links, join link exchanges, or pay for placements dressed as editorial. Do not publish text churned out in bulk by software and not checked by you, copied text with a few words changed, or pages built only to catch a search phrase. Do not buy followers or fake reviews. Search engines penalise these practices when they detect them, and readers leave when they see them. Neither recovers quickly.

Neighbours

Before search engines grew dominant, blogs found readers through one another, and it still works. Link generously to other writers when their work helps yours; many will notice. Leave thoughtful comments on blogs in your field, under your own name, without dropping links. Keep a blogroll. Write a guest post for a site you respect when you have something worth saying there. Some blogging software supports webmentions, a standard that notifies a site when another site links to it.

Patience

A new site may take months to appear meaningfully in search results. That is normal. The posts written in the first year often go on being found for many years afterwards.

Stage 10Images, Copyright and Your Own Photographs

Copyright is automatic

In most countries, a photograph, a drawing or a piece of writing is protected by copyright the moment it is made. No registration, notice or symbol is needed. So the picture that turns up in an image search belongs to someone, and the fact that it is easy to copy says nothing about whether you may.

Two common beliefs cause most of the trouble. The first is that giving credit makes use lawful. It does not; credit is courtesy, and permission is a separate matter. The second is that a small, non-commercial blog is exempt. It is not, and image owners and the agencies acting for them do find unlicensed copies and send demands for payment.

Where images can lawfully come from

• Your own photographs and drawings. The best source, and the one this guide recommends first.
• Licensed stock. Free and paid image libraries each have their own licence. Read it: some forbid particular uses, and a few "free" sites carry images uploaded by people who did not own them.
• Creative Commons. Images whose owners have chosen a standard licence allowing reuse under stated conditions, explained below.
• The public domain. Works whose copyright has expired or been given up. How long copyright lasts varies by country, so "old" is not the same as "free".
• Written permission. Ask the owner, say where and how you will use the image, and keep the reply.
• Limited exceptions. Many countries allow limited use without permission for purposes such as criticism, review or news reporting, called fair use in the United States and fair dealing in India, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. These exceptions are narrow and vary by country. A review of a photograph may be able to show it; a travel post cannot borrow one to look nice.

Creative Commons, briefly

Creative Commons licences are built from a few elements. BY means you must credit the creator. SA, share-alike, means anything you make from the work must carry the same licence. NC, non-commercial, forbids commercial use. ND, no derivatives, forbids altered versions. CC0 is a dedication placing the work as close to the public domain as the law allows.

A good attribution gives the title of the work, the author, the source where you found it, and the licence, often remembered as TASL. The NC element needs care: if your blog carries advertising or sponsorship, whether a given use is "commercial" is not always clear, and the safe course is to choose images without it.

Your own photographs

You own the copyright in photographs you take. Other rights still apply.

People. Ask before publishing a recognisable photograph of someone in a private setting, and be especially careful with children, including your own. A child cannot consent to a picture that will be findable for the rest of their life.

Places. Many countries allow photographs of buildings, and often of artworks permanently placed in public, to be published; the details vary. Museums, monuments and private venues may restrict photography, tripods or commercial use, and flying a drone is regulated almost everywhere. Check before you shoot.

Hidden information. Phone photographs usually carry embedded data, called EXIF, which can include the exact location where the picture was taken. Many blogging platforms strip it; not all do. Remove location data from any photograph taken at or near your home.

Screenshots and embeds

Most social platforms offer an embed option, which displays a post on your blog under the platform's own terms. It is usually safer than a screenshot. Screenshots of private messages or of posts by ordinary people raise privacy questions as well as copyright ones (see Stage 12).

When your work is copied

Put a short copyright or licence statement on your site so readers know your terms. If you find your writing or photographs copied, start with a polite written request to the site owner. If that fails, most web hosts and platforms have a formal process for reporting infringement. Keep dated screenshots of the copy as evidence.

Stage 11Comments, Community and Moderation

Do you want comments at all?

Comments turn a blog from a broadcast into a conversation. Readers correct errors, add experience and ask the questions that become the next post. On some blogs the comment threads are the most valuable pages on the site.

They also cost time, attract spam in industrial quantities, and occasionally bring hostility that makes writing miserable. Some writers close comments and invite replies by email instead, which filters out almost everyone who was not going to be constructive. Both choices are respectable. What does not work is leaving comments open and never looking at them.

Write a policy

A comment policy is a short, visible statement of what you will publish and what you will remove. It saves arguments, because you can point to it rather than justify each decision. Five or six lines are enough. Apply it consistently, including to people who agree with you.

Spam

Automated spam is the largest part of any open comment system. The defences are routine:

• a spam filter, which most platforms include or offer as a plugin;
• holding a commenter's first comment for approval, after which later comments from the same person appear directly;
• closing comments automatically on posts older than a few months, when nearly all new comments on them are spam;
• never approving a comment whose only purpose is a link.

Moderation

Distinguish criticism from abuse. A reader who says your recipe failed, or that your argument is wrong, is doing you a favour, even when tactless; answer the substance and, if they are right, correct the post. A reader who insults, threatens or harasses has broken the policy, and the right response is deletion, not debate.

Do not argue with people who are clearly trying to provoke. A calm deletion gives them nothing to work with. Where a commenter persists under new names, most platforms let you block by email or network address.

Harassment and safety

If harassment goes beyond the comment box — messages elsewhere, contact with your family or employer, threats — keep a record: dated screenshots, addresses, anything that identifies the sender. Block and report on each platform involved. Take threats of violence to the police. Review what personal detail your blog reveals, from your street in a photograph to your children's school. Part II describes the reporting routes in India (see Stage 20).

Your responsibility for what readers write

In many countries a site owner can become legally responsible for unlawful material in comments, particularly after being told about it and failing to act. The details differ from place to place and are a question for a lawyer, but the safe practice is the same everywhere: do not approve comments that make damaging factual allegations about named people, and remove plainly unlawful material promptly when it is reported.

Community beyond the comment box

The warmest blog communities rarely live only in comments. They form through replies on other blogs, email correspondence, small online groups, and occasional meetings in person. A writer who reads and links to others, and who answers email, will usually find a community without having to build one.

Stage 12Ethics and Law: Sponsorship, Defamation, Privacy and Real People

This stage sets out general principles that apply in many countries. It is not legal advice. Laws differ from country to country and change over time, and anything serious — a legal notice, a threat of action, a decision to publish something damaging about a named person — calls for advice from a qualified lawyer where you live. Part II covers India's disclosure rules and some Indian law that bears on bloggers (see Stage 20).

Disclosing money, gifts and relationships

Readers trust a blog because they believe it is saying what the writer thinks. Anything that might affect that — and that readers would not expect — should be disclosed. Advertising regulators in many countries, among them the Federal Trade Commission in the United States and the Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom, treat undisclosed paid promotion as misleading advertising.

A material connection is broader than payment. It includes:

• money for a post or a mention;
• free products, meals, stays or trips;
• discounts, gifts and competition prizes offered to you;
• commission earned through affiliate links;
• a family, business or employment relationship with the company or person you write about.

The disclosure should be clear, prominent and early: at the top of the post or immediately before the first relevant link, in plain words such as "This post is sponsored by…" or "I was given this product free". A note at the foot of the page, a vague "thanks to our partners", or a tag among twenty others does not do the job.

Defamation

Defamation is, broadly, publishing a false statement of fact that damages someone's reputation. It can apply to a blog post, a comment, a caption or a headline, and in many places repeating someone else's defamatory statement can make you liable too.

Some general principles hold widely. Truth is usually a defence, but you must be able to prove it, not merely believe it. Honestly held opinion based on facts you state accurately is generally treated more leniently than allegations of fact. Businesses and public figures can still sue.

The practical rules:

• State facts you can prove, and label opinion as opinion.
• Before publishing a serious criticism of a named person or company, give them a chance to respond, and say so in the post.
• Never write about someone in anger. Draft it, and decide tomorrow.
• If you get something wrong, correct it quickly and visibly, and apologise where appropriate.
• Never ignore a formal legal notice, and never answer one in a public post. See a lawyer.

Privacy

Some information about a person is private whether or not it is true: health, sexuality, finances, family conflicts, home address, children. Publishing it can hurt them badly and, in many countries, can also break the law. Private messages, emails and closed-group posts were written for a few people, not for your readers. Ask before quoting them, and assume the answer is no.

Writing about real people

The richest personal writing is about other people, and the people in it did not agree to be characters.

• Ask family members and friends before writing about them in ways they would recognise, and let them see the draft where the matter is sensitive.
• Change identifying details if you must write about someone without consent. Know that this often fails: a combination of small details — a job, a town, an age — can identify a person to everyone who knows them.
• Label composites. If a character is built from several people, or events are compressed, say so.
• Mind your employer. Many employment contracts and policies restrict what staff may publish about work, clients and colleagues, even anonymously.
• Apply the face-to-face test. Would you be willing to say this to the person, in front of people who know you both? If not, think again.

Credit and honesty

Credit sources, including the other blogs where you found an idea. Do not pass off others' writing as your own. If a post relies substantially on text or images produced by software, many readers would expect to be told, and every fact in it still needs checking by you.

Stage 13Making Money Lightly and Honestly

Should you?

Most blogs earn nothing, and most that earn anything earn little. That is fine. A blog is not a failed business if it was never meant to be one. The question is not how to monetise a blog, but whether money would improve or damage the thing you enjoy.

A useful test: would you still write this post if it paid nothing? If money starts choosing the subjects, the blog has become a job, and should be judged as one.

The options

Display advertising. An advertising network places adverts on your pages and pays according to views or clicks. It needs large numbers of visitors to produce meaningful income, slows pages down, and puts on your site messages you did not choose. For most personal blogs it is the least rewarding option.

Affiliate links. A retailer pays a commission when a reader follows your link and buys something. It suits blogs that already recommend products. The honest rules: disclose every affiliate link, recommend only what you would recommend anyway, and never let the commission decide which product "wins".

Sponsored posts. A company pays for a post about its product or service. Label it clearly, keep editorial control, decline anything you would not otherwise write about, and remember that readers can see a pattern.

Paid subscriptions. Some readers pay for extra posts, early access or a paid newsletter. It works best for writers with a clear subject, a regular schedule and a loyal readership, and it turns a hobby into an obligation.

Reader support. A simple way for readers to give a small sum, once or monthly, with no paywall. In India, instant bank transfers through UPI have made small payments unusually easy.

Selling your own work. Books, printed collections, photographs, recipes, courses or talks. The blog is the showroom.

What the blog leads to. For many writers, the largest earnings are indirect: commissions from editors who read the blog, freelance work, speaking invitations, a job, a book contract. None of it requires putting anything on the blog except good writing.

Keeping it light

Decide your rules before the first offer arrives, while no money is on the table. Write them down. A short list of things you will not do — no sponsored posts on health, no products you have not used for a month, no paid links — is easier to keep than a judgement made case by case with a cheque in view.

Keep the money visibly separate from the writing. The disclosure page (see Stage 12) and a consistent label on every commercial post let readers trust everything else.

Records and tax

From the first rupee, keep a simple record of income and of valuable items received: date, source, amount or value, and what was published in return. Income from a blog is taxable in most countries, and free products received for promotion can have tax consequences too. Once earnings become regular, talk to an accountant; in India that means a chartered accountant (see Stage 20).

Storage and Preservation

Stage 14Storage: Why Online Writing Disappears, and Owning Your Archive

A published post feels permanent. It has an address, search engines index it, strangers link to it. It is in fact one of the most fragile forms of writing people have ever produced. A letter in a drawer survives neglect for a century. A blog survives neglect for about as long as the next unpaid bill.

Everything in this stage rests on one idea: the copy on the web is a display copy, not the archive. The archive is the set of copies you hold yourself.

How writing disappears

The platform closes. Services are bought, merged, starved of investment and shut. GeoCities, which hosted millions of personal pages, was closed by its owner Yahoo in the United States in 2009. Posterous, a simple blogging service, closed in 2013 soon after Twitter acquired it. Orkut, the Google social network that was enormously popular in India, shut in 2014. Users were usually given notice and a way to download their data. Many never saw the notice, or meant to act and did not.

The domain lapses. A card expires, a renewal email goes to an old address, and the name is released and bought by someone else (see Stage 8).

The account goes. Accounts are suspended by automated systems, taken over by attackers, or locked when the phone number that confirmed them is no longer yours. Some large providers now delete personal accounts that have been inactive for a long period.

The database is lost. A self-hosted blog is a database plus a folder of files. Either can be corrupted by a failed update, wiped by an attacker, or deleted by the host when the bill goes unpaid. Backups kept by the host, on the same servers, often go with it.

Links rot. The pages you linked to move or vanish, images you displayed from other sites break, and embedded videos are removed. The post survives but loses its evidence.

Your own devices fail. Drafts, original photographs and the only export sit on a single laptop that is stolen, dropped or simply dies.

Formats age. Files that only one program can open become unreadable when the program goes. Indian-language text typed in older, non-standard font encodings turns to nonsense without the right font (see Stage 17).

The owner tidies up. A redesign changes every address; a purge of "embarrassing" old posts removes the ones that were most linked; a well-meant clean-up deletes the comments.

What your archive consists of

Exports and backups

On a hosted platform, find the export tool and run it monthly. Download the images separately if the export only links to them. If you run a newsletter, export both the posts and the subscriber list.

On a self-hosted blog, a complete backup has two halves: a copy of the database and a copy of the files, especially the uploads folder that holds images. Most hosts and backup plugins can schedule both. Make sure at least one copy is sent somewhere other than the server itself.

On a static site, your text files are already the archive. Keep them under version control or in a synchronised folder, and back up the folder of images with them.

Plain text and Markdown copies

Whatever the platform, keep one copy of every post in plain text or Markdown: one file per post, named with the date and the slug, filed in a folder per year, with the title, date, tags and original address written at the top of the file. Conversion tools exist for the major platforms' export formats.

Plain text is the most durable digital format there is. Any computer made in the last fifty years can read it, and there is no reason to think the next fifty will be different. A database export needs the right software and the right version. A text file needs only a text editor.

The 3-2-1 rule

Keep three copies of the archive, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them away from your home. For example: the live blog and your laptop count as two; an external drive is the third, on a different kind of storage; and an encrypted copy in a cloud storage account, or a drive kept at a relative's house, is the off-site one. The live site does not count if it is the thing you are protecting against losing.

Testing a restore

A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a backup. Once or twice a year, prove it. For a self-hosted blog, restore the database and files to a test installation and click through it. For any blog, open the plain-text copies on a different computer and check that the images are there. The first test often reveals something missing: the uploads folder was never included, the export stopped in 2021, the drive will not mount.

Storage media, honestly

Heat, humidity and power

Most of the Indian climate's damage to a digital archive happens to the hardware. A drive carried from an air-conditioned room into monsoon air can gather condensation; leave it in its closed bag for half an hour to warm up before connecting it. Power cuts and voltage surges during a write can corrupt files; run backups on a machine connected to a UPS or at least a surge protector. Dust clogs laptop fans and pushes temperatures up. Store external drives in a closed box in an interior cupboard, away from the outside wall, windows and the kitchen, with a sachet of silica gel through the wet months. Replace external drives every few years, before they fail rather than after.

Stage 15Preservation: Domains, Accounts, Print Archives and Digital Legacy

Stage 14 dealt with copies. This stage deals with the keys, the long-term record, and what happens when you are not there to look after the blog.

Domain renewal

The cheapest single act of preservation is renewing the domain for several years at once. After that:

• Keep auto-renew on and the payment card current; a new card number is a common cause of a lapse.
• Put the expiry date in your calendar, with reminders sixty and fourteen days before.
• Make sure renewal notices go to an email address that does not depend on the domain itself. If the domain lapses, email at that domain stops arriving, including the warnings.
• Know what happens after expiry. For many common endings there is a grace period and then a costlier redemption period before the name is released. The lengths and fees vary by ending and registrar. Find out for yours now, not during the crisis.

Account security

Every account that could lose you the blog — registrar, host, platform, the email that receives password resets, the cloud storage holding backups — needs the same protection.

Unique passwords, kept in a reputable password manager, so one leaked password opens nothing else.

Two-factor authentication, a second proof of identity beyond the password. An authenticator app or a hardware security key is stronger than a code sent by text message, because phone numbers can be hijacked; a text message is still far better than nothing.

Recovery codes. When you turn on two-factor authentication, most services show a set of single-use codes for when the phone is lost. Print them, and keep them in two separate safe places. Do not keep them only on the phone they are meant to replace.

Current recovery details. A mobile number left unused is eventually disconnected and can be reissued to a stranger. Update recovery numbers and emails whenever they change.

No single point of failure. Draw it out. If one email account were lost, which other accounts could no longer be recovered? If the answer is "all of them", add a second recovery route, and for a self-hosted or shared blog, a second trusted administrator.

Images and drafts

Keep full-resolution originals of every photograph in your own photo archive, not only the resized copies on the blog. Keep the image log and licence records (see Stage 10) in the same backup as the posts. Keep drafts as files in a backed-up folder rather than only inside the platform's editor, because an unpublished draft is often excluded from exports and is the first thing lost when an account goes.

Web archiving services

Public web archives crawl the web and store copies of pages. The best known, the non-profit Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, also lets anyone ask for a particular page to be saved, and some national libraries collect websites from their own countries. Saving your important posts to such an archive, and saving the pages you link to, gives readers a fallback when links break.

Treat these services as a public safety net, not your backup. They may miss images, scripts and comments; they may not capture every page; they can remove material on request; and you cannot restore a working blog from them.

A print and PDF archive of the best work

Once a year, choose the posts you would most want to survive — twenty or fifty, not everything — and make a copy that needs no power and no software.

Save each as a PDF that shows the title, date and original address. Where your tools offer PDF/A, a version of PDF standardised for long-term archiving, use it. Then print the collection, or have it bound as a small book. Print on good, acid-free paper with a laser printer or pigment inks, which resist fading far better than common dye inks; avoid thermal paper, which fades within years. Keep one printed copy at home and give another to a relative.

The same care applies to the paper side of any blog: the notebooks of ideas, field notes and handwritten drafts.

Paper and drives in the Indian climate

Paper suffers from humidity, heat, light and insects. Through the monsoon, and year-round in coastal cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, damp air encourages mould and the brown spotting called foxing. Silverfish and cockroaches graze on paper and bindings, and termites work through wooden shelves and the backs of cupboards against damp walls. North Indian summers bake rooms under the roof. Power cuts switch off dehumidifiers and air conditioning just when they are needed.

These are honest household ranges, not museum specifications. Stability matters more than any exact number: paper that stays at a moderate humidity is safer than paper swinging between dry and damp.

Silica gel absorbs moisture until it is saturated. Indicating types change colour when they need drying; dry them according to the packet's instructions, usually in a low oven, let them cool in a closed jar, and keep them away from children and food. A hygrometer costing a few hundred rupees (2026) tells you whether the gel is working. In the dry season, open the boxes, air the notebooks, and look for spotting or insect damage.

Digital legacy

If you died or could no longer manage your affairs tomorrow, what would happen to the blog? Very often, the card is cancelled, the domain lapses, the host deletes the account, and years of writing vanish because nobody knew it existed or how to reach it.

• Decide what you want. Keep it online, keep it online but closed to comments, pass it to someone, save it to a public archive and close it, or delete it.
• Write a legacy note. List the blog, the domain and registrar, the host, the email accounts, where the backups and the print archive are, and your wishes. Keep passwords out of it; point instead to a password manager's emergency-access feature, where available, or to a sealed letter kept safely.
• Use the tools that exist. Several large services let you name a person to receive data or manage an account after long inactivity or death, among them Google's Inactive Account Manager, Facebook's legacy contact and Apple's Legacy Contact.
• Name a person, and tell them. A note nobody knows about is no note.
• Think about the rights. Copyright in your writing passes to your heirs. In India, for a literary work published in the author's lifetime, it generally lasts until sixty years after the author's death. You may wish to grant a licence now so that the writing can be freely shared later. The law on digital accounts in inheritance is unsettled in many countries, India among them, and platform terms often decide what is possible in practice. A lawyer drafting a will can advise.

Stage 16The Indian Blogosphere Takes Shape

Dial-up and cybercafés

Public internet access in India began in 1995, through the state-owned VSNL. For years afterwards, being online usually meant a slow dial-up connection at home or an hourly rate in a cybercafé. The first Indian blogs, in the early 2000s, were written in those conditions, and their writers were a narrow slice of the country: software professionals, journalists, students at technical colleges, and Indians living abroad who wanted to argue about home.

Free services, above all Blogger, removed the last technical barrier. A blog cost nothing but time, and by the middle of the decade there were Indian blogs on politics, cricket, cinema, books, food, law, economics, technology and the ordinary comedy of family life.

The voices people remember

A handful of blogs from that period are still widely remembered. Amit Agarwal, who started the technology blog Digital Inspiration, is often described as India's first professional blogger: he left a job to write about software full-time and made a living from it when that was almost unheard of. Amit Varma's India Uncut combined a steady stream of commentary on news and public life with a distinct liberal voice; he later wrote a novel and became a well-known podcaster on Indian public policy. Arnab Ray, writing as Great Bong, built a large readership with sharp, funny posts on Bengali life, cricket and Hindi cinema, and published books drawn from that voice.

They were exceptions in scale, not in kind. Thousands of less famous blogs did the same things for smaller circles, and much of the best writing of the period sat on them.

A network, not a list

What made it a blogosphere rather than a scattering of sites was the linking. Writers kept blogrolls, answered each other's posts, and argued in each other's comment threads. Volunteer-run aggregators picked out the best Indian posts each day, and communities such as IndiBlogger grew into directories with their own contests and meetings. Bloggers met in person in the larger cities, often for the first time after years of arguing online.

When blogs became a public service

Blogs showed their value during emergencies. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, a group of bloggers, several of them in India, set up a blog to gather verified information about relief, missing people and needs on the ground. During the Mumbai floods of July 2005, and again during the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, blogs and early social tools carried first-hand reports, lists of helplines and offers of shelter faster than many established outlets.

Dispersal

From the late 2000s the energy moved. Orkut, then Facebook and Twitter, took the quick posts and much of the conversation. Many blogs fell silent; some were deleted; a good number simply stopped at a last post and stayed there. Those that survived were usually the ones with a clear subject and a writer who would have kept going without an audience — and some of the most-remembered writing of that decade can now be read only in public web archives.

Stage 17Blogging in Indian Languages and Scripts

Before Unicode

Writing a blog in an Indian script was once a technical feat. Before Unicode — the international standard that gives every character in every major script its own code — most Indian-language text on computers used font-based encodings. The text was stored as ordinary Latin letters and punctuation, and a special font drew them as Devanagari, Tamil or Bengali. Without that font installed, a reader saw nonsense. Search engines could not index it meaningfully, and copying it into another program usually broke it. Widely used Hindi typing fonts such as Kruti Dev worked this way, and Tamil had its own pre-Unicode standards.

As operating systems, browsers and phones gained proper Unicode support during the 2000s, the barrier fell. Text in Indian scripts could be typed, searched, linked and read on any modern device.

Communities in many languages

Once the tools allowed it, blogging communities formed in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and other languages. Hindi and Malayalam bloggers were among the most visible and organised. Hindi bloggers adopted the word chittha for a blog, and Malayalam bloggers called their world the boolokam. Language blogs ran their own aggregators, contests and gatherings, and many writers who found no room in print publishing built real readerships online.

Typing

There are three common ways to type an Indian script today:

• InScript, a standard keyboard layout for Indian scripts, fast once learned;
• phonetic transliteration, where you type the sound in Roman letters and software converts it into the script, the easiest start for most people;
• voice typing on phones, now good enough for drafts in several Indian languages, though it still needs careful correction.

Practical choices

Fonts. Choose a blog design whose fonts properly support your script, including conjuncts and vowel signs. Test a paragraph on a phone before committing.

Addresses. A slug written in an Indian script looks right in the browser bar but turns into a long string of codes when copied and pasted elsewhere. Many language bloggers keep the title in the script and the slug in simple Roman letters.

Mixed scripts. If you write in two languages, tell your platform which language each post is in, where it allows, so search engines and screen readers handle it correctly.

Domains. Domain names can now be registered in several Indian scripts, including the .भारत ending, though the ordinary Roman-letter endings remain far more common.

A preservation warning

If you or your family have old writing — a blog, articles, documents — typed in a legacy font encoding, it is at risk. When the font is lost, the text becomes unreadable. Converters exist that map the common legacy encodings to Unicode. Convert a copy, have a fluent reader check it carefully, and keep the original alongside (see Stage 14).

Stage 18Food, Travel, Literary and Tech Blogs

Food

Indian food blogging grew from the mid-2000s into one of the largest and most useful parts of the Indian web. Many of its early writers were home cooks, a good number of them Indian women living abroad, recording the regional and family dishes they could not find in cookbooks — the precise way a grandmother tempered a dal, the festival sweet of one district. Blogs ran shared events, in which one host set a theme or an ingredient and others cooked and posted to it.

Photography improved from phone snaps to careful natural-light work, and many recipe blogs later added video or moved to it. Several grew into substantial businesses. The quieter achievement is the archive: an enormous, searchable record of Indian home cooking, much of which exists nowhere else.

Travel

Cheaper domestic flights from the mid-2000s, better trains and mobile maps opened India to independent travellers, and travel blogs followed: budget routes, treks, heritage walks, pilgrimages, road trips. Community sites let ordinary travellers publish trip reports.

Travel writing carries particular duties. Safety information must be current and hedged, especially about treks, altitude and monsoon routes. Some border and tribal areas need permits; photography is prohibited near defence installations and restricted at some other sites. Local people are not scenery, and publishing a remote place's exact location can bring crowds it cannot absorb.

Literary

For many Indian writers, the blog was the first place they found readers. Poets, short-story writers, humorists and essayists published in English and in Indian languages, and publishers began to notice. Arnab Ray's books grew out of his blog's voice, and Amit Varma published a novel, My Friend Sancho, in 2009. Book-review blogs formed their own community, often more generous to Indian writing than the national press had space to be.

Technology

Technology blogs were among the earliest to earn money. Amit Agarwal's how-to posts on software and web tools reached readers worldwide. Gadget-review and startup blogs followed, some becoming established publications: MediaNama, founded by Nikhil Pahwa, grew into a leading source on Indian digital policy, and YourStory, founded by Shradha Sharma, into a large platform for startup stories.

Stage 19From Blogs to Newsletters and Video

Where the conversation went

Through the late 2000s, Orkut was one of the most popular social networks in India, and its communities hosted exactly the kind of discussion blogs once carried. Facebook and Twitter followed, and later messaging groups, where writing circulates widely but without an address, an author or an archive. Many Indian bloggers moved their energy to these places and let their blogs lapse.

The arrival of cheap data

After 2016, mobile data prices in India fell sharply as new operators competed for customers, and hundreds of millions of people came online through phones. The new audience watched more than it read, and much of it preferred Indian languages to English. Video, and especially short video, became the dominant form of popular creation. Cooking, technology reviews, comedy, education and travel all found huge audiences on video platforms, many of them led by people who had started as bloggers.

A lesson in platform risk

In June 2020 the Indian government blocked TikTok along with dozens of other apps. Creators who had built large followings there lost their channel in a single announcement, and with it their way of reaching those followers. Many rebuilt on other platforms, which launched or promoted short-video features in India within weeks. The creators who recovered fastest were often those who had kept their original videos and had somewhere of their own — a site, an email list — to which they could point their audience.

Newsletters and podcasts

From the late 2010s, Indian writers took up the email newsletter: free and paid newsletters on business, finance, policy, technology, culture, cricket and books, some growing into substantial subscription publications. Podcasts grew alongside them. For a writer, a newsletter restores something social media removed: a direct line to readers that no ranking system controls.

Where the blog fits now

For a creator working across all of these, the blog is the home base described in Stage 2. Each video can have a written post with a summary, the key points, the recipe or the specifications, and corrections. Each newsletter issue can live on your own domain. The social platforms bring the audience; the site at your own address keeps the work and gives every follower a place to find you if a platform disappears.

Stage 20Disclosure and the Law for Indian Bloggers

This stage summarises, in general terms, the rules most likely to matter to a blogger in India. It is not legal advice. Rules and guidelines change, and several described here have been revised since they were first issued. Before relying on any of them, read the current text from the body that issues it, and for anything serious consult a lawyer or a chartered accountant.

The ASCI guidelines

The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) is the advertising industry's self-regulatory body. In 2021 it issued guidelines on influencer advertising in digital media, which apply to promotional content on blogs as well as on social platforms. Their core principles, as far as they bear on a blogger:

• When there is a material connection between you and a brand — payment, free products, discounts, trips, or a family or employment relationship — the promotional content must be disclosed.
• The disclosure must be upfront and prominent, where readers will see it before they engage with the content, not buried among hashtags, hidden behind a "more" link, or placed only at the end.
• It should use clear labels of the kind "Advertisement", "Ad", "Sponsored", "Collaboration" or "Partnership", rather than vague words such as "thanks".
• You are expected to take reasonable care that claims you make about a product are not misleading.

ASCI has since added further expectations, including for people giving financial or health advice, who may need to disclose relevant registrations or qualifications. The securities regulator, SEBI, has also acted on unregistered financial influencers. If you write about investments, check SEBI's current position as well as ASCI's.

Consumer protection law

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 created the Central Consumer Protection Authority, which can act against misleading advertisements, and the Act can reach endorsers as well as advertisers. In 2022 the government issued guidelines on misleading advertisements and endorsements, and in January 2023 the Department of Consumer Affairs published a guide on disclosures for celebrities and social media influencers. Penalties under the Act can include fines and, for endorsers, a period of being barred from endorsing. For a blogger the practical rule is the same as ASCI's: disclose clearly, and do not endorse what you have not used or cannot stand behind.

Tax on gifts and earnings

Income from a blog is taxable, and free products received for promotion are not automatically outside tax. Since 2022, businesses have been required to deduct tax on certain benefits they give, which can include items given to influencers. GST registration can become necessary once turnover passes the applicable limit. India's income-tax law has also been rewritten, so section numbers quoted in older articles may no longer apply. A chartered accountant can tell you what applies to you.

Speech online

For years, Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 criminalised sending "offensive" messages online in vague terms, and it was used to arrest people for posts and comments. In 2015, in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional. The same judgment upheld the government's separate power to order websites to be blocked. Rules made under the Act also place duties on online platforms, including handling complaints.

Defamation

In India defamation can be both a civil wrong, for which a person can sue for damages, and a criminal offence. The criminal provisions, long part of the Indian Penal Code, were carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the Code in 2024. In 2016 the Supreme Court upheld criminal defamation as constitutional. Legal notices alleging defamation are a real feature of Indian online life, and the advice in Stage 12 applies with full force: do not ignore one, and do not answer it in public.

Personal data

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs the handling of personal data, and its rules have been brought into force in stages. If your blog collects email addresses for a newsletter, runs comments, or tracks visitors, you are handling personal data. Collect only what you need, say plainly what it is for, let people unsubscribe and ask for removal, and check how the current rules apply to an individual or small publisher.

Copyright

Under the Copyright Act, 1957, your writing and photographs are protected automatically. Registration with the Copyright Office is optional, though it can help as evidence. The Act allows fair dealing for purposes such as private use, research, criticism, review and reporting current events, within limits.

Harassment and threats

Online harassment, threats, impersonation and fraud can be reported through the government's National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal or the 1930 cybercrime helpline, and to the cyber cell of the local police. Keep dated screenshots and addresses before reporting. Large social media platforms operating in India are required to have grievance officers, and their reporting routes are worth using alongside the police.

Glossary

A

Affiliate link — a link that earns the writer a commission when a reader buys through it; must be disclosed. [Stage 13]

Alternative text — a plain description of an image for readers who cannot see it, also read by search engines. [Stage 9]

Archive — the pages listing a blog's older posts; also, in the preservation sense, the copies of the blog you hold yourself. [Stages 2, 14]

ASCI — the Advertising Standards Council of India, the advertising industry's self-regulatory body, which issues guidelines on influencer disclosure. [Stage 20]

Atom — a standard feed format, an alternative to RSS. [Stage 2]

B

Blogroll — a list of links to other blogs the writer recommends. [Stage 2]

C

Cadence — how often a blog publishes. [Stage 6]

Category — a broad, fixed grouping for posts. [Stage 2]

CC0 — a Creative Commons dedication placing a work as near the public domain as the law allows. [Stage 10]

Comment policy — a short public statement of which comments will be published and which removed. [Stage 11]

Creative Commons — a family of standard licences letting creators allow reuse on stated conditions. [Stage 10]

D

Defamation — publishing a false statement of fact that damages someone's reputation. [Stages 12, 20]

Digital legacy — what happens to your accounts, sites and writing when you can no longer manage them. [Stage 15]

DNS — the system that points a domain name at the servers for its website and email. [Stage 8]

Domain — the rented name of a website, such as a name ending in .in or .com. [Stage 8]

E

Embed — a platform's feature for displaying one of its posts or videos on another site. [Stage 10]

EXIF — data stored inside a photograph, which can include the place it was taken. [Stage 10]

Export — a platform's download of your posts and data in a file. [Stages 7, 14]

F

Fair dealing — the limited legal exception in India and elsewhere allowing some use of copyright work without permission, for purposes such as review or reporting. [Stages 10, 20]

Feed — a machine-readable list of a blog's recent posts that readers can follow. [Stages 1, 2]

Font encoding — an older way of typing Indian scripts in which a special font draws ordinary characters as the script; unreadable without the font. [Stage 17]

Foxing — brown spotting on paper, encouraged by damp. [Stage 15]

H

Hosted platform — a blogging service run by a company, which handles servers, software and security. [Stage 7]

Hygrometer — an instrument that measures relative humidity. [Stage 15]

I

InScript — a standard keyboard layout for Indian scripts. [Stage 17]

Inverted pyramid — a structure that puts the most important information first. [Stage 4]

L

Legal notice — a formal letter alleging a legal wrong and demanding action; never to be ignored. [Stages 12, 20]

Link rot — the gradual breaking of links as the pages they point to move or vanish. [Stage 14]

M

Markdown — a plain-text format in which simple marks indicate headings and emphasis. [Stages 7, 14]

Material connection — any relationship with a brand, such as payment or free products, that readers would not expect and that must be disclosed. [Stages 12, 20]

N

Newsletter — writing delivered to subscribers by email, often also kept in a web archive. [Stages 2, 19]

P

PDF/A — a version of the PDF format standardised for long-term archiving. [Stage 15]

Permalink — the permanent address of a single post. [Stage 2]

Permanent redirect — an instruction sending anyone who requests an old address to its new one. [Stage 8]

POSSE — Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere; putting the full work on your own site first. [Stage 2]

Public domain — the status of works no longer protected by copyright. [Stage 10]

R

Recovery codes — single-use codes that let you into an account when the second factor, usually a phone, is lost. [Stage 15]

Registrar — a company accredited to rent out domain names. [Stage 8]

Registry — the organisation that runs a domain ending such as .in. [Stage 8]

Restore test — rebuilding a site or opening an archive from a backup to prove the backup works. [Stage 14]

RSS — the most widely used feed format. [Stage 2]

S

Self-hosting — running blogging software on web space you rent and maintain. [Stage 7]

SEO — search engine optimisation; making pages easy for search engines to understand, honestly or otherwise. [Stage 9]

Silica gel — a drying agent that absorbs moisture in a closed box until saturated, then can be dried and reused. [Stage 15]

Sitemap — a file listing a site's pages for search engines. [Stage 9]

Slug — the readable last part of a post's address, usually made from its title. [Stage 2]

Static site generator — software that turns text files into finished web pages with no database on the server. [Stage 7]

T

Tag — a narrow label for a post; a post may carry several. [Stage 2]

Three-two-one rule — keep three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one away from home. [Stage 14]

Transliteration — typing a language in Roman letters and letting software convert it to its own script. [Stage 17]

Two-factor authentication — a second proof of identity, beyond a password, needed to sign in. [Stage 15]

U

Unicode — the international standard giving every character in every major script its own code. [Stage 17]

W

Web archive — a public service that stores copies of web pages over time. [Stage 15]

Webmaster tools — free services from search engines that show how a site appears in their results. [Stage 9]

Webmention — a standard by which one site notifies another that it has linked to it. [Stage 9]

Further Reading and Organisations

On writing

• William Zinsser, On Writing Well. The standard guide to clear non-fiction.
• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird. On the habits and anxieties of drafting.
• Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style. Why some prose is easy to read.
• Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing. On the single sentence.
• Ann Handley, Everybody Writes. Practical, for writing on the web.
• George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language". A short essay on plain words.

On blogging and the web

• Rebecca Blood, The Weblog Handbook. An early practical guide by one of the first well-known bloggers.
• Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything. A history of blogging's first decade.
• Dan Gillmor, We the Media. On citizen journalism as blogs made it possible.
• Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!. A short argument for sharing work in progress.
• Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. On permanence, memory and what should be kept.

The Indian story

• Arnab Ray, May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss. Humour in the voice that made his blog widely read.
• Amit Varma, My Friend Sancho. A novel by one of the best-known Indian bloggers of the 2000s.
• The public web archives, for the Indian blogs of the 2000s that are no longer online.

Laws and guidance to read in their current form

• Advertising Standards Council of India, guidelines for influencer advertising in digital media.
• Department of Consumer Affairs, guide to endorsement disclosures for celebrities and influencers.
• Consumer Protection Act, 2019.
• Information Technology Act, 2000, and the rules made under it.
• Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
• Copyright Act, 1957.

Organisations

• Advertising Standards Council of India — advertising self-regulation, including influencer disclosure.
• Central Consumer Protection Authority — the statutory authority acting on misleading advertisements.
• Copyright Office, India — voluntary registration of copyright works.
• National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) — runs the .in domain registry.
• National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, Ministry of Home Affairs — reporting online harassment, threats and fraud.
• Internet Freedom Foundation — an Indian organisation working on online free speech and privacy.
• SFLC.in — an Indian legal services organisation working on technology law and digital rights.
• Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru — research on internet policy in India.
• Creative Commons — the organisation behind the standard open licences.
• Internet Archive — the non-profit library that runs the best-known public web archive.
• Digital Preservation Coalition — guidance on keeping digital material usable over time.
• Unicode Consortium — maintains the character standard used for Indian scripts.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation — a United States digital rights organisation with guidance for online writers.
• The IndieWeb community — people who publish on their own sites, and the origin of POSSE and webmentions.

Image Sourcing Sheet