I came onto the Internet scene pretty early, when personal web pages were still a fairly new concept. I remember doing a search for "parrots" at the time on one of the few search engines that were available. My search came back with 2 or 3 results. Today if you do the same search, you will see about 6.5 million results!

I set up my first personal web page in 1996. Web pages have come a long way since then. Services such as Geocities, AOL and others have allowed millions of people to set up their own HTML web pages fairly easily. However, today I think the best way to set up a personal site is to have a blog (or weB LOG).

If you're not familiar with blogs, they are web sites that usually consist of posts entered and ordered by date. They can be centered around any topic you can imagine or no topic at all. Most blog hosting sites support the addition of photographs to your blog posts, and some even support audio and video.

If you are thinking about setting up a personal web page for the first time or are simply looking for an easy way to maintain an existing web site, I think for more people a blog is the way to go. The tough work is already done for you. You don't need to learn HTML or other web difficult technologies, and setting up your new web site is as simple as heading over to Blogger.com and signing up. Here at QuakerParrots.com, you can even receive a free blog site when you join the Quaker Parrots Forum.

Once you have signed up for a blog, adding new pages to your web site is as simple as submitting an online form with the text of your article in it. You can use your blog to promote a business, share articles and thoughts on topics that interest you or even document events in your life to share with family and friends.

So if you want to have your own personal web page but aren't sure how to get started, why not give blogging a try? It's easy, fun and allows you to have your own little piece of real estate on the world wide web.