What’s a Blog and How to Start One?
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It seems that the word of the year for the past couple of years has been Blog. Everyone is talking about blogs, everyone blogging, and even right now, you are reading a blog.
Wikipedia nicely defines what blog is:
A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.
Now that we have that clear it’s also good to note that unlike starting a regular website, starting your own blog is much simpler; in fact, it’s almost trivial! There are couple of ways around this:
- Use one of a bunch of on-line, mostly free, blogging platforms. These are on-line services which provide you with everything you could possibly need to start blogging. A website address, blogging back-end (or the service which you can log into and manage your blog from), and a lot of themes and options allowing you to customize the blog to your own liking. There’s nothing like a nice and pretty looking blog! If the content on it is equally interesting, you’ve got yourself a jackpot!
- Option number 2 is to sign up for web hosting and setup your own blog. Even this does not have to be too hard, most Web Hosting providers these days offer very easy to use Control Panels which allow you to install numerous blogs with just a couple of mouse clicks. No need to know PHP, HTML, and such.
Sounds interesting? Well read on… Let’s weight the pro’s and con’s of each so you can decide how to proceed. Time is of the essence 
Selecting the right Blogging Platform is one of the most important aspects. My main concern when it comes to blogging platform is the price. Since there are numerous AWESOME platforms you can use for FREE, I will not write about the ones that you have to pay for by default. There is really no need for such thing! Blogging itself is all about freedom; being it freedom of speech, freedom of expression, or freedom of more bills
There are a bunch of very good services out there so here’s a small roundup of the most popular ones:
- Blogger.com (owned by Google) is one of the most popular and easy to use of all blogging platforms. All you need is a Google Account (which you can create if you do not have) and within 2 minutes you can be up and running. It lets you setup multiple blogs within one account and you can manage them all with ease. If you are a first-time blogger and just looking for something simple - this is by far the #1 way to go!
Pro’s: incredibly simple!
Con’s: incredibly simple!
- A typical blog looks like this: http://buzz.blogger.com/ - MSN Spaces (offered by Microsoft under their Windows Live Services umbrella) for free as well is a very nice way to start blogging especially if you already use Hotmail for your emails and such. While Spaces is nice and allows you to easily upload pictures, videos, and it has a bunch of gadgets (or widgets) you can add onto your page, I do not really like it.
Every blog should have a distinctive look and especially a look which lets visitors concentrate on the content, not be bothered by the commercials. While MSN Spaces provides a nice stable blogging platform, every single MSN Space of every single user looks more/less the same! Sure you can change colors, but Microsoft inserts their Web Search bar at the very top as well as a big advertisement. Sincerely, if you want to be taken seriously, go another route.
- A typical blog looks like this: http://mondaymorningmoments.spaces.live.com/ - Movable Type is a very scalable and a bit hard to setup/use platform. It offers pretty much everything you might need, and it could be a good choice if you are in a need for a bigger blogging platform (say for commercial use, or something other than a personal blog). One thing I really like about it is that all posts can be published statically so when ever someone visits your blog, they are served a static page which does not make even one call to your database. This is the main reason why it is great - it simply does not pull any strain on the server it runs on and it is incredibly fast. (opinion based from my own experience while running VistaJuice.com, a blog about Windows Vista)
- Typo: is a blogging solution based on Ruby on Rails. Rails is a very fast web framework and if the server the blog is running on is configured correctly, Typo should provide some of the fastest blogging around. I personally do not use it since I find it too simple, and then at times (especially while trying to make it work for the first time) too hard
- A typical blog (after some nice customization) looks like this: http://room.nathanielguy.com/
- And now we come to the WINNER. The best blogging platform you can possibly choose!
WORD PRESS!
There is simply no better blogging platform than this! It just does not get simpler, more scalable, more customizable and more lovable than WordPress! What BenchPress does for you in the gym, WordPress does it for you on the web!
Remember when I mentioned how important it is to choose the right platform the first time? This was simply because if you choose something you end up not being able to customize or use the way you really want - you will have to go and move to another platform. Importing everything from there can really be a pain. If you choose Word Press - I am most certain you will fall in love and never look back again!
A typical word press blog looks like nothing you’ve seen before since it is so customizable and there are so many themes available on-line that you simply cannot pinpoint a typical blog. Sure they have that one default theme look, but that’s not a typical look since most people change the theme immediately.
This site runs on Word Press, but so does my main personal site: boss.peconi.com. My girlfriend has her own site, EasilyForgotten.info which also runs on WordPress. You can see they look nothing alike (aside the regular things most blogs have) but underneath there’s a heart of a lion.
You can find a list of all WordPress powered blogs here: http://www.poweredbywp.com/
This is one of the only blogging platforms which is easy to configure, easy to use, but also very easy to expand so you can create a real work of art from them. One of the nicest features I find in WordPress is that everything is easily accessible and configurable through it’s control panel. You can drag-and-drop to add widgets and different things into your blog’s sidebar, but also, you can change the themes on-the-fly with just one click! It has plugins for anything: from videos, podcasts, photo albums, Flickr images, to comment spam detection, to well implemented cashing - so you do not put too much strain on your web server.
The best of all, you can have your own WordPress blog ready in minutes. Just go to WordPress.com, enter your username of choice, password and email address and you’re on your way.
If you want to host WordPress on your own server, it is available for download and it’s quite easy to setup. As I mentioned, most hosting providers offer "one-click" installation solutions for most popular web applications and one of them is WordPress by default! Check with your hosting provider if this is the route you wish to go - it might be easier to implement than you think. If you need hosting you can even go to my very own PeconiHosting.com!
So, these is the rundown on the most popular blogging platforms. I think that the choice should be mostly clear by now which one is the right one for you. In the next article I will show you what’s better route to go: On-Line based or Self-hosted?
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