Blogware & CMS - where to create a blog?

There are dozen of way to publish a blog. This article covers some of the most popular service and software to create a blog.

It would be every blogger's dream to just start writing and never worrying about anything else. While that would certainly be wonderful, most of the time we have to manage everything in running a blog. Fortunately, there are blogging service & blogging software/scripts/blogware out there that take the most tedious and technical aspects out of running a blog. In fact, sometimes you might just be able to setup your blog with a few clicks and start writing (rest of the time is where blogcrowds comes in :D). Since blogging service/blogware can make your job incredibly easier, it is crucial to choose the one right for you.

Social Blogging

There are some distinction between different types of blogging; one of the being social blogging. If you are blogging about your personal life like your cat, your calendar etc with friends and family, social blogging is for you. As you can see, this is very close related to Social Networks and most major social networks have a blogging section. The largest social networks MySpace, Facebook dominate this side of blogging while MSN Space, Yahoo 360 also draw a crowd with their email, IM service etc. Signing up these services is very simple usually you just need an email address.


Online Blog Publishing Services

For those who does not need as much social element, you can sign up for blogging service such as Blogger, Live Journal.

Blogger
One of the first weblog publishing system on the internet, Blogger was initially launched in August 1999 by Pyra Labs. Unfortunately at that time it requires a subscription fee. As blogging become more and more popular, Google acquired Blogger in 2004 and made it possible for more people to use blogger by eliminating the premium!

Google subsequently improved Blogger by integrating its photo-sharing software Picasa and Hello. Another popular feature of Blogger is the FTP and SFTP for more advanced users to directly update their blogs. For less tech oriented users there is even a Microsoft Word add-on that allow users to use Word to edit their blogs on and offline.

Today, Blogger is characterized by a variety of clean cut validated CSS templates, ease to sign up and publish and one of the best blog publishing service on the web.

Live Journal
One of the earliest blog communities, LiveJournal was founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick. In early 2005 it was purchased by Six Apart which also owns Movable Type. LiveJournal is largely free with additional features for paid users or advertised sponsorship. Despite some social network features including user info, contact information, user avatars, LiveJournal is still heavily blogocentric. Users have a list of friends or flist who are allowed to comment on blog in message board style threads and view private entries effectively hidden from most search engines and viewers. In addition, LiveJournal provides group journals consisting of members who are allowed to post in the journal and moderate it. LiveJournal is written in PERL by volunteer programmers and therefore it is open-source. Because of this, many other sites also runs LiveJournal software including DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, Blurty and numerous other more shortlived communities.


Blog Publishing Software/Scripts

For even more control in blogging, you can host a blog on your own server with a blogging script/software. If Blogger is the most popular blogging services, than WordPress would be the most popular blogware. Other blogware includes Drupal, MovableType. While setuping WordPress can be a little more complicated than signing up for Blogger, it can still be done in a few minutes and the enhanced feature/control is certainly worth the extra clicks.

WordPress
WordPress is the free blog publishing system written in PHP & MySql. Many current stand alone blogs use WordPress. Along with the cost, WordPress attract bloggers with its multiple features:

- Manage multiple blogs on one server.
- Manage static html pages
- Manage users/groups
- Moderate comments
- Simple template system with excellent skins
- Integrated link management
- Extensible plugin support to take advantage of open-source communities.
- Subcategory, multiple category entry
- Ease of formatting and styling

Drupal
Drupal is the content management/blogging system written in PHP by Dries Buytaert. The name is Dutch for drop.

Drupal is initially written as a bulletin board system. Drupal supports pluggable extension for advance functions such as Amazon Item module, workflow, mailing list, photo galleries, CVS integration. Drupal also offers unique content classification system and tighten security. However, because of the additional features Drupal is in comparison more difficult to install. In addition, Drupal is known to have a less attractive appearance compared to other blogware, but its clean code allows advance users to add their own features to take Drupal from a blog to a full fledge community. Because of this, Drupal is used in company intranets, online classrooms, and other online projects. Special versions of Drupal includes, DrupalED, DrupalArt, vbDrupal.


This covers many flavors of blogging platforms to publish your blog, but by no means exhaustive. If you have any questions fell free to get in touch.

Happy Blogging!