Back to Basics
The term "blog" is the short and highly popular name for a "web log"--an online (that's the "web" in "web log") log or journal or diary (that's the "log" in "web log") whose entries (called "posts") are published in reverse chronological order. They took the "b" from "web" then spliced it with "log" to come up with "blog". That's the long and the short of it, based on the various online sources I visited in the process of my research.
A blog is basically different from a conventional website in how they are written. The latter is great for delivery of content but is mostly static, often impersonal and infrequently updated. By contrast, the former is very easy to update, more versatile and dynamic in content delivery, and allows for two-way communications, making it more personal than a conventional website (click this for more). Realizing this, a growing number of websites now have a blog or several blogs within them.
Blog Publishing Systems
The earliest weblogs were authored by Internet geeks because it was only they who knew how to write in a language that could be read and understood by computers. However, even they grew tired of the difficulties in updating their online journals manually each time. So, eventually they designed a publishing sytem that automated the whole process.
What the Internet geeks came up with was a browser-based (when I say "browser", I'm referring to the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox) software which contained a Content Management System specially designed for creating and maintaining weblogs. Thus, with this weblog software, all that a blogger (even a non-techie) needed was a web browser and Internet access to be able to post to his online journal.
There are several such software applications or blogging platforms. In my case, my first blog was on a Blogger (*Blogspot*) platform for no particular reason except that somebody, whom I met quite serendipitously, recommended it and said I could blog there for free. That got me hooked. But Blogger.com was by no means the only provider of free hosted blogs on the Web, so when I got confident enough with my first blog, I decided to explore other free hosted blogs at Blogstream.com, Wordpress.com, and Multiply.com. Over time, I have abandoned these other blogging platforms and recently started converting some of my blogs into custom domains (I will devote a separate post on this).
Here is a list of some of today's blogging platforms, available either as a service or download, which I have excerpted from www.benh.org :
WordPress.orgMy Take on Blogging Platform
WordPress.org is the best and well-known open source Blogging platform. It is widely used commonly by popular self-hosted blogs around the blogosphere. It runs with minimal setup and it requires just PHP/ MySQL preferably in Apache. It rates high compared with other since it can be highly customized. In addition to this there are huge number of plugin authors and theme authors are there to help reduce bloggers effort. WordPress.org also has nice development community that ensures the WordPress core get better and better.
Blogger
Blogger is a free one-push blog publishing platform. Most of the novice bloggers starts Blogging with Google’s Blogger in first place. The new blogger comes in with Widget support that eradicated the use of HTML for templates. Setting up a blog in Blogger is painless and easiest of anything else. You can customize Blogger to certain extend only since they are not an open source solution. There are few popular blogs that still runs on Blogger.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a multi-user version variant of WordPress.org. WordPress.com have their own-hosted solution of newbie bloggers, who doesn’t have a hosting space. WordPress.com comes in with neat option for a newbie. WordPress.com comes with space restrictions; in addition to that you can monetize your blog.
Movable Type
Movable Type is a web blog publishing platform successfully developed by SixApart. It is the one who invented Trackback feature in the first hand that was later devised by other blogging systems as well and now it is more-or-less a standard. Movable Type is written in Perl and supports most of the Database as backend. Movable Type is best suited for business use.
Typepad
Typepad is a blogging service provided by SixApart and it is one of largest paid blogging service available now. Typepad is based on Movable Type and it shares most of its technical functions. Additionally, it also supports multi-user, mobile and photo blogging. Typepad is been successfully used by lot of professional writers.
LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a CMS that allows you to express your self by publishing your private journal, your blog or your forum or any of a social entity. It is the best in town for writing life journals.
Vox
Vox is a personal blogging service. It’s all about ease of use, privacy control, playing well with other web services, and staying connected to the people you care about. Vox is good platform when it comes to multimedia blogging.
Text Pattern
Text Pattern is a flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites. Blogs works fine as well. Text Pattern also has its own list of plugins and templates.
Drupal
Drupal is a modular content management system and the blogging engine was initially indented for bulletin board system. Drupal is good for building online communities and those communities powers their blogging engine. It is written in PHP. It has a wide community support.
Joomla
Joomla is truly a content management system that forked from Mambo, a pretty good open source content management system. Joomla has won the best open source content management system of the year 2006. Joomla has a decent blogging engine and other extension.
Expression Engine
pMachine’s Expression Engine is not well known but it is a powerful and much extensible software that you may need to give a try. It is a complete content management system with much Blogging feature as well. In addition to Blogging module it comes with inbuilt gallery module. It is more suitable for heavy business blogs. Also the cost associated with it is high.
Nucleus
Nucleus is been around for sometime now and it is not much popular yet though. Nucleus is mature blogging software that comes with most of the required blogging features. Nucleus is also programmed in PHP and runs on MySQL backend.
b2evolution
b2evolution was developed from the same original code that spawned WordPress. b2Evolution is written in PHP and licensed under GPL so is always free to use. It comes with lot of features that you may need to check, which includes antispam, skins, multi-blogs, users, authors, integrated stats, its own plugin framework etc. etc.
TeraPad
TeraPad is hosted blogging solution which takes the blogger beyond the blogging experience. TeraPad comes in with versatile blogging tools, image gallery, PayPal ready shopping cart, event calendar etc. TeraPad places a its ad over the site which might annoy bloggers a little but may be needed for TeraPad to keep its service free.
With the benefit of hindsight, these are the pointers that I'd like to share with you in deciding on your blogging platform:
--If you intend to monetize your blog or if PageRank is important to you, it will pay over the long term to resist the temptation of a free hosted blogging platform (I will devote a separate post to explain this some more. For now, just take my word for it).
--Among the self-hosted blogs (i.e., not free), the most popular blogging platform is Wordpress for the above-cited reasons.
--Between a free hosted Blogger and a free hosted Wordpress (I cannot speak for the rest), the former proved to be the more versatile platform from the viewpoint of monetization.
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