Google’s Blogger (www.blogger.com)

Blogger is a straight-forward individual blogging tool designed for people who would rather not dabble with friends lists and community building and instead focus on building an individual blog. The major draw for Blogger is the fact that it is built for just about every sort of user, from the absolute novice to the experienced professional. The posting interface is very easy to use and understand and requires no HTML knowledge whatsoever. Of course, if you have some HTML knowledge and would like to exercise it, there’s a direct HTML editor, as well.

The greatest feature of Blogger is how extensible it is. You can host your blog on the Blogger hosting service, Blogspot.com, or if you already have a Web site established and simply want to add a journal to it, you can have Blogger.com publish to it via FTP. The templates Blogger provides for the layout of your journal are fresh and well designed, but if you want to completely design your own from the ground up (or make it match the layout of your existing site), the template editor makes this a piece of cake.

Blogger also allows multiple authors to contribute to the same blog. This is a huge benefit for themed blogs or blogs that do not deal specifically with one individual, such as technology, entertainment, or current events blogs. To learn more about creating a blog with Blogger, see “Build A Blog” on page 100.

The main draw of LiveJournal.com is the community. As a user, you can add other users to your “friends” page, which will show a set number of the latest entries made by users on that list. Through this type of networking, LiveJournal has created a very intricately woven social network which has permeated the Internet. While the posting and layout customization options aren’t as vast as other blogging services, LiveJournal’s social scene more than makes up for it.

LiveJournal.com also has a paid service which you can purchase in increments of two, six, or 12 months. For about $2.50 a month, paying members of LiveJournal.com gain the ability to submit posts by email and create compressed audio posts via phone. In addition, users can create polls for their blog, create RSS feeds (lists of links to which people can subscribe) for content propigation, a LiveJournal.com subdomain (joepeacock.livejournal.com, for example), photo storage (starting at 100MB with the ability to purchase more space), and an @livejournal.com email address.

You should be aware of LiveJournal.org, the development home of the LiveJournal software, which powers the LiveJournal.com blogging community. The .ORG site is not part of the blogging community or interface, but if you’re interested in finding out how the software itself works, it’s worth a visit.



Xanga (www.xanga.com)

Xanga offers both a free and a paid Premium service. The free utility offers the same blogging utilities as other services of its kind, an interface for entering posts to your Weblog (which requires little or no HTML skill, but allows for direct HTML editing, if you so choose), color and layout customizations, and archival of old entries. It also has quite a large community of interconnected users, much like LiveJournal, which are not only organized by lists of friends but also by blog-rings (groups of similar blogs, organized into a directory of interests). You can find anything from Entertainment (music, humor, movies) to Sports (football, baseball, hockey) to Gardening and Politics in the blogring directory. Xanga also uses eProps, the Xanga currency of goodwill for its community. Users can let you know how much they enjoyed a particular entry by endowing you with these eProps. The more eProps, the more fellowship behind a particular entry.

The thing that sets Xanga’s free service apart from other utilities is definitely ease of use amidst a vast array of options. The initial setup wizard for Xanga is particularly nice, as it walks you through every step of creating and customizing your blog with easy-to-use forms and options. Xanga also freely offers the xTools Browser Button, a tool that installs to your browser and allows you to instantly create a link back to any page you are visiting on the Web. It will also quote any text you have highlighted on your visited page, a major plus for blogging ease.

Xanga’s paid features include an expanded editor for posting blog entries with greater access to font sizes and styles, a greater palette of selectable colors for customizing your blog, 20MB of image hosting, downloading and archiving of your entire blog to your hard drive, automatic saving of posts as you type, spell checking, posting via email, and last but not least, the elimination of banner advertising on your blog. They have monthly, yearly, and lifetime plans ranging from $4 a month to less than $2 a month, depending on how much time you plan to pay for up front.

TypePad is a paid blogging service which runs on the Moveable Type software. Plans start at $4.95 a month for one author/one Web log (Basic) and go up to $14.95/month for unlimited authors and unlimited Web logs (Pro). The varying levels of membership bring with them more bandwidth and more disk space for hosting as the price goes up.

TypePad’s Moveable Type software is probably the most fully featured suite available for blogging. It includes, as others do, a rich-text interface for formatting your blog entries, as well as a myriad of layout and design templates to design your blog. Where Moveable Type differentiates itself from the pack is in Trackbacks, links that keep track of other Web pages and/or blogs that reference your blog entries. By using Trackbacks, you can keep tabs on who is linking to your entries, as well as how many links back to your entries there are.

TypePad is also the clear leader in photo management. The TypePad photo album creation process is completely automated; just locate the image on your computer or cell phone, and the wizard takes care of the rest. Photo albums are also access controlled.

TypePad also features Mobile Blogging. With a text-enabled cell phone, you can send your blog entry to TypePad via SMS (Short Message Service), and it will be available for viewing within seconds. With a camera phone, you can send pictures directly to your photo album from your handheld. The same is also true with email, PDAs, and virtually any other device capable of sending text and pictures across the Web.



MindSay (www.mindsay.com)

MindSay is a relative up-and-comer in the world of blogging. A strictly free service, MindSay allows bloggers to build a social network amongst their peers and even vote on blog entries to be featured on the MindSay home page each day. It has a somewhat interesting location search, allowing bloggers to find other users in their area via a ZIP code search. The MindSay interface is straight-forward and easy to use, allowing creation of hyperlinks and insertion of images with little or no HTML knowledge required.

MindSay thrives on tagging (the identification of a topic by a single word, or “tag”). Each day the most used tags are collected on the MindSay home page for easy search of blog entries by topic. Along with integration with the Amazon.com profiling software, users can easily determine the most talked about books, movies, and music by visiting Mind-Say’s Most Mention pages, which provide direct links to the media being discussed for easy purchase.



Do-It-Yourself Blogging

If you are an advanced user with access to your own Web hosting service, you may be more satisfied with downloading and installing your own blogging software. There are several benefits to doing this, namely customization of the blogging tools and control over how things are run. There are also drawbacks; when you run your own blogging software, anything that goes wrong is ultimately up to you to fix. Make sure you read all of the documentation associated with a blogging utility before installing and running it.

Moveable Type is the software that TypePad runs on, as well as corporate and personal blogs the world over. It’s the most widely used blogging software available and among the most robust.

Moveable Type's posting interface features a rich-text viewer for formatting your blog entries’ font size, typeface, and color, as well as a direct HTML editor from the window. There are also numerous templates for Moveable Type, available from several sites across the Internet.

There is a free version of the Moveable Type software available for download, but many users will find the license agreement to be somewhat restrictive, as they will be limited to one author and three Web logs maximum. Additionally, there is no official support available for the free version of Moveable Type. But there are numerous Moveable Type user groups around the Web, the most notable being the one located at groups.yahoo.com/group/mt-dev. The licensed versions do come with support, however, and start at $69.95 for basic personal use.

Both licensed and free versions of Moveable Type feature the things that makes it so highly regarded as a blogging utility: trackbacks, photo albums, mobile access, and a wide array of layout options. As far as do-it-yourself blogging solutions go, Moveable Type is a solid option.



Wordpress (www.wordpress.org)

For those looking completely free, no frills and no hassle personal publishing software, Wordpress is the way to go. It began life as b2/cafelog back in 2001 but has restructured to become the most popular free blogging software available.

Wordpress, to put it simply, is a simple posting system that runs from either downloaded or custom-created templates. The interface is user friendly, consisting of a text editor, link creation buttons, image posting buttons, and other standard posting utilities. It also manages archived posts and allows for comments on articles. It is somewhat limited in features compared to Moveable Type, but then again, it’s 100% free. Wordpress will require that PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor) and MySql be installed on the server from which it will be hosted.



Blog On

Blogging has become not only ubiquitous, but also simple to do. No matter what theme you decide to write on or method you choose to write it, with the solutions provided here, you should have no trouble finding a service or utility that suits your needs. So think about what you want to say and how you want to say it, pick a blogging provider, and get writing.

by Joe Peacock