euRgeek - Do you blog?

By tedoe on Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 14:42

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.

The free options:

It boils down to two choices really. Blogger ( also known as blogspot, then bought by google and had a name change) and Wordpress.

Many people are attracted to blogger because it's a google product and while I am a fan of many things google this is not one of them. For several reasons but THE main one is that you are taken of site to post a comment. This might sound silly but I find it really very annoying as do many other people.  And you have to create a google account to leave a comment. But it's undeniably simple to start a blog with blogger.

Wordpress is another matter. The free blog version is much more limited then the wordpress for a hosted domain but still much more flexible then blogger in my mind. Easily adding sidebar widgets (like a twitterfeed/flickr photos/ links/ etc), it has a very good spam filter and has many many many templates. You can also buy upgrades such as more space or the ability to change the CSS code. You can also import any blogger blog into wordpress, something that you can't do the other way around. Because it's more customizable it also means that there is a little bit more work to start your blog. But it's worth it in the end.

Between the two I would choose wordpress.

Open sourcs CMS for you paid hosting:

With this it becomes a whole different ballpark. For these you need the ability or know someone with the ability to set it up on your hosting or there is also hosting that already has one of the systems installed. Learning the basics is not that complicated and the internet is filled with how to guides. :)

There are many systems out there and the list is growing I am focusing on a few of the ones that you will see the most of.

Wordpress: is really THE blogging system. They started out for bloggers and have kept true to their audience. It has one of the easiest to use customer interfaces and is fairly easy to customize the basics but takes quite a bit of know how to fully create your own theme. That said because it's one of the most popular blogging systems there are thousands of free templates. Not all of them good and not all of them free.

For free but excellent templates I suggest a site like : smashingmagzine the best deal for paid templates are to be found on themeforest. Templates here are not expensive, uniquely designed and through the comments you can have contact with the designer who generally is very helpful.

Drupal: Doesn't have many templates to start with, a pain to code yourself, adapt and extremely rigid. (on the scale of even your mother can use it, itcomes below “this leaves your mother very confused”.) Don't get me wrong, drupal has it's purpose but it's not for the simple blog. That said drupal is considered by many to be the better for a larger complicated community based web site.

Joomla:

I mention it here purely because if you've been searching around the internet for how to set up a blog then undoubtedly joomla will have come up. In one word: NO! Joomla is evil! . The learning curve for you is so high just to have a blog that you'll end up in some asylum somewhere wondering where it all went wrong. The user interface is a nightmare and there are so many solutions to one problem that you'll never find the right one.

It might not have escaped your notice that Wordpress stands out here and that is purely because it was created for bloggers and that's what it's best at.

The new contenders that are worth a look at:

Frog cms: the name is cute enough. It's in the early stages of development and as such has a very small community but it strength lies in a developer community that's intent on building a very user friendly system.

Concrete5 : has all the strengths of frog with the added ability of in page editing. Meaning you don't have to go to an administration page.

Because both of these are fairly new, there will not be that many theme or templates for them. What works in their favour though is that the developers have one thing in mind and that's to create a system that's easy to use.

 Considering that the majority of bloggers are not webdesigners or developers this is kind of important.

If you are serious about your blog then I can strongly recommend paying for hosting and choosing one of the above systems. I would say wordpress, right now, because it has the largest community which means the most help, the most online guides and the most templates.

Whichever one you choose from the above or another one, research first. Find the one that best suits your needs and seems the easiest for you to use.

Good luck!