If you want to start a blog today, the easiest technology to use is a hosted online service like Blogger. These services do everything for you except write your copy and take your photos. You don't have to learn any code, mess with any code setup or spend time designing your blog from scratch. Blogger is just one of several services that do all this for you for free.
Want a traditional mostly-words blog? Blogger (also known as Blogspot) will do fine, and you can be up and filing your first blog post in 10 minutes. As a bonus, because Blogger is run by Google, Google AdSense is built in, which will allow you to convert traffic into a few dollars. You won't get rich, but if your site eventually becomes popular, you might take in enough to buy something nice on eBay. There are several other online services that work fine, but most other free services forbid ads. A good one is Wordpress.com. This online service is great! If you eventually discover you want to set up your own script, this makes it easy, since the technology that drives wordpress.com is available for download at wordpress.org. It's a strong and versatile PHP/MySQL script that is quite easy to set up.
One reason you may prefer a script you set up to a hosted service like Blogger is that virtually all hosted services (at least the free ones), force you to agree at signup that they acquire basically all rights to whatever you post. They mostly want to be able to use your material for marketing their service, but the language usually leaves it totally up to the service what they do with your words and/or images. Once you pay for service, this generally is not an issue.
If you know a bit of HTML and know what FTP means, you are equipped to rent webhost space and install the blogging script of your choice. The most popular blog scripts are quite simple to install and set up. Joomla is famous for it's quick and painless installation, but other scripts like Drupal or Wordpress are no more difficult. Some, like SimplePHPBlog, are even simpler.
If, instead of words, you will mostly be uploading photos or just a few sentences, you might like the service at tumblr.com. It works a lot like Blogger, but is oriented toward images and video posts. It works great! If you like the idea a quick and fun posting of images and words, but would prefer to control your content, take a look at Gelato CMS. It is a free PHP/MySQL script that emulates the functionality of tumblr. I love Gelato. It's fun. It's fast. It works. It looks good.
For beginners at blogging, I recommend Blogger.com, Wordpress.com or Tumblr.com. They work well, they're free, they're easy to get going right now.
For people who are interested in renting server space and running their own script, I recommend WordPress.org or Gelato CMS (which is a blog script, not a CMS script). Wordpress is a tested, reliable and versatile blogging script with lots of available add-ons and templates. Gelato is a new script, but it works fine for me is perfect for fast, painless posts. Wordpress allows total customization of appearance and functionality. Gelato offers a couple of nice templates, but little else - but it doesn't need anything else.
Take your pick and get down the real business at hand - writing your blog!
3/29/2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment