Free Blogs!
There are a number of free blogging tools on the web
at this time, and though they vary a bit in function and quality, I
can recommend some of them as excellent tools to get your message out
to the world quickly and easily. A blog, or Web Log, is simply a small
personal web site that lets you archive the material you post, and allows
people to comment on your posts.
BlogSpot - or E-Blogger
Probably the best known Blogging tool out there at the
moment is called Blogger at http://www.blogger.com/
It is hosted by Google, and is pretty easy to use, and really is free.
There are some complaints about the fact that to many people use it
to through up to much information about nothing, and that others use
it to spam people with comments meant to promote their own Blogs, but
I think it is a good place to start when learning to blog. It is fully
featured and doesn't try to get a few bucks out of you for features
you wish you had.
BlogEasy
Probably the one I have had the best luck and least
trouble with is BlogEasy at www.blogeasy.com
They would like you to enroll for $2.50 a month to get rid of some Adsense
adds on the side of your blog, or to put your own there, but it is a
nice interface, and worked well. It also submits itself automatically
to a number of blog search engines when you use it, and I have gotten
more traffic to it than the others.
Tripod
Hosted by Lycos Tripod is easy to use. I am not so crazy
about the blog tool interface, but they probably have the best tool
around for creating simple web sites by yourself without previous training.
Tripod.com
TypePad
Typepad may be the best tool around, PC Magazine says
so, it's just that it isn't free. Maybe that is a good thing, as it
really is a sharp program. It is listed here because it a does have
a free trial period to let you give it a test, and it really is a good
blog tool that allows you to have a little more class than the others.
http://www.typepad.com
WordPress
Wordpress is kind of in it's own category. That is, if you have no experience
with web programming, you will proably fail to get it to work. However,
if you know your way around a a bit in html, ftp, etc., it is a very
powerful tool for blogging, and it is free. It is written in PHP, but
editing the files is easy, and they have automated the installation
process to a great degree. The beauty of WordPress is that you can install
it on your own server, and customize the heck out of it. You can install
it on ten servers for that matter, who cares? At least you are hosting
your own blog in this case. WordPress
Key Features
- Full standards compliance
--- We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress
generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C.
This is important not only for interoperability with today's browser
but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation.
Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing
less.
- No rebuilding --- Changes
you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on
your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
- WordPress Pages --- Pages
allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could
have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. For
an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could
be run off WordPress alone. (We don't for technical mirroring reasons.)
- WordPress Links -- Links allows
you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through
your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an
external blogroll manager.
- WordPress Themes --- WordPress
comes with a full
theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest
blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can
even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch
with a single click. Have a new design every day.
- Cross-blog communication tools---
WordPress fully supports both the Trackback
and Pingback
standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as
they develop.
- Comments --- Visitors to your
site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback
or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable
comments on a per-post basis.
- Spam protection --- Out of
the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated
blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam
on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take
this functionality a step further.
- Full user registration ---
WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose)
can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated
comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered
users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
- Password Protected Posts ---
You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public.
You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
- Easy installation and upgrades
--- Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and
other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you'll wonder why all
web software isn't this easy.
- Easy Importing --- We currently
have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger,
and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
- XML-RPC interface --- WordPress
currently supports an extended version of the Blogger
API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can
even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
- Workflow --- You can have
types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front
page.
- Typographical niceties ---
WordPress uses the Texturize
engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct
XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and
en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information
about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin's article
The Trouble With Em
’n En.
- Intelligent text formatting
--- If you've dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks
before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of
HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately,
breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently
avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags,
so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
- Multiple authors --- WordPress'
highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with
different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with
regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
- Bookmarklets --- Cross-browser
bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to
your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
- Ping away --- WordPress supports
pinging Ping-O-Matic, which
means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.
We are located in Clearwater Florida and
serve clients around the country.
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