euRgeek - Do you blog?

By tedoe on Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 15:42

Vocabulary :

Free hosted: Your site will have a name like, www.yournames.blogspot.com and you don't have to pay a thing to set up this blog.

Paid hosted: Your site will be www.yourname.com , you have to pay a (small) fee for you domain name and pay a company for hosting you site.

Open source software: This basically means that it is free. It is made by the community, for the community and the source code is published for developers.

CMS: Content management system is a web application that allows the user to change content online, rather then having to work in the source code themselves.

CSS: cascading style sheets. This is the code that styles your web page. colours, positions of text area and images, size of your text and images etc.

An important first choice : a free or a paid hosted blog:

free hosted option sounds the most appealing to many beginner bloggers as you need minimum to no knowledge to get started and blogging. This however comes with certain restrictions such as little control over how your blog looks and feels besides some of the basics such as colors and the header at the top of your blog.

Paid hosted sounds expensive but it doesn't have to be. This requires a little bit more ability (but the basics are easy to learn for most systems) and has the benefit of full and complete control. Meaning you can make your blog look and feel like you want, rather then being stuck with a generic template.

Tags: blogs, euRgeek, Internet, tech talk

unfolder

Submitted by unfolder on July 5, 2009 - 16:51.

I agree with you that right now, Wordpress seems to be the best blogging system out there.

I've been using it with paid hosting for a couple of years now and it's very easy and fun to use. And like you say, there are a lot of themes available for it, so it's fun to change the looks from time to time w/o having to put a lot of time into it. Also when you host Wordpress yourself, you can edit the looks of the theme through CSS (banner, colors, ...) to really make it fit you :)

Didn't know about frog and concrete5 yet, thnx for the introduction :)

keep your options open...

Submitted by rochelledancel on July 5, 2009 - 17:19.

I think the blogging interface that you pick will probably depend on the level of technical expertise that you have to skin or hack it as you like. Also, it might sound a bit left field, but it is possible to have a blog, or to turn your website into a blog, without using a blogging programme, service or ap; for example, you could apply HaloScan, JS-Kit or Disqus for commenting, throw in an RSS feed, and away you go! Of course, you don't get the SEO benefits as quickly, but still...

To add to your picks, let's throw in Thingamablog, Moveable Type, Expression Engine, Typepad and good old LiveJournal to name but a few. And if you want to edit them on your desktop and/or offline, here's a useful article with 20+ desktop blogging clients

I haven't yet tried it with the free version of Wordpress, but one of the great things about Blogger is that it's very easy to skin and integrate into an existing website; for example, if it wasn't for the blogger favicon that we still use, you couldn't tell that the Life On Fletcher blog started as a Blogger site and is still powered by Blogger. How does it work on the free version of Wordpress if you want to move it to your own domain? Would you have to do a whole installation on your server or is it like Blogger, where you just put in your domain, publishing path and ftp account details et voila?

(btw, you don't have to have a google account to publish comments in blogger: you can allow anyone to publish, even anonymously - just change your comments settings)

Love your picks for new contenders - will definitely check them out!

why I made the choices that i made :)

Submitted by tedoe on July 5, 2009 - 21:07.

I was looking at this from the point of view of a beginner and someone who is not into design or developing. as well as keeping it opensource. things like haloScan, Js-kit or disqus doesn't really fall into that category I think. but i could be wrong. I don't think a beginner or someone not in the field would even find these solutions so easily.

Expression Engine is divine and a beautiful piece of work, I do love it but it's not open source and it's not free.

The same with typepad. actaully very easy to use for the entry level blogger but not opensource and thus not free.

Moving the free wordpress to a domain hosted one does require a litte bit more work then blogger but I remain a fan of WP over blogger.

and the others, well, choices had to be made and I went for the most common ones. thingamablog is FTP based (more complicated), livejournal is considered kind of on it's last legs, Moveable type has only just become opensource so it remains to be seen how that will turn out but I am assuming good cause it was a good cms to begin with...

Wordpress FTW!

Submitted by Cath on July 5, 2009 - 18:49.

...and even the free Wp.com hosted options are pretty decent - with changeable headers and the sidebar widgets, a generic template can turn into something unique.

My only bone to pick at the moment is the (due to the no Javascript policy) impossibility to have an external stats widget that processes more than how many people have read which post.
Blogger has unlimited widget options, but I try to stay away from too much google. And the templates... meeh.

The storage limits on WP (3GB) are dandy to work with and since you can host media elsewhere, it's easy to work around the limitations. All in all, a good choice for starters without any prior knowledge.

____________________________

Blogging against windmills:

1 Spaniard. 1 German. 2 pairs of glasses. 3 languages. ...and trying to get married.

What about easiest?

Submitted by Natazzz on July 5, 2009 - 20:09.

As someone who isn't very technically inclined, my main concern when it comes to blogs is that it is easy.

I've been using Blogger for a while now, and besides a few problems now and then, I am happy with it. Perhaps others are better, but are they easier?

- - - - - - - - - -

Who doesn't have a blog these days?

I takes a little bit more to

Submitted by tedoe on July 5, 2009 - 21:10.

I takes a little bit more to set up Wordpress but the reward is worth it. once set up it is easier to use then blogger. it's admin panel is considered to be one of the most user friendly out there.

and you can add cool side bar stuff :)

dangerous...

Submitted by maxime68 on July 6, 2009 - 07:31.

your articles are dangerous for me, they always end in me spending more - time or money ;)

When I decided to set up my blog with blogger I had already had a look at different blogs i liked and preferred the blogs hosted with blogger. Many of the wordpress blogs I had seen were boring - they all look the same - I do know now, that it's all in the hands of the blogowner.

What a coincidence that I've just recently started giving my blog and the hosting more thought.
I agree, that blogger is completely easy and if I could find a reliable offline editing software, I would be more than happy.
I guess my problem is, that I'm no pro when it comes to publishing/programing/design etc., but I know just enough of it to get frustrated with blogger easily.

So I started with the obvious thing now, something I probably should have done first (before starting a blog at all) and that's to get my personal url.

@comments on blogger
you and rochelledancel are both right, I've tried all the settings. No registering brings to much spam, so I've settled with the option that you need to sign in, but it's not exclusively for google accounts, many other account like wordpress, livejournal etc. are accepted too.

stalk me: http://spoilmyself.blogspot.com

I prefer Wordpress as well

Submitted by Saskia Joreen on July 6, 2009 - 10:39.

I prefer Wordpress as well. I've been blogging for a few years now on various free hosted hosted blogs, like the Dutch web-log.nl, Blogger and Wordpress.

I like the free hosted Wordpress because it's easy to use for beginners and yet very customizable for more advanced users. You can use some HTML in the sidebars and for a mere 10 dollars a year, you can edit the CSS of your blog. If I were to decide on moving from a free hosted to a paid hosted blog, I would definitely stick with Wordpress.