Blogging is a web publishing format that lends itself well to sites with frequently updated content, and since it’s become so popular, there are a wide variety of software and services that make it an easy scene to get into. There are many different content management systems designed specifically to manage a blog, and they fall under two main classifications: blogging services hosted by various companies, and blogging software you install yourself. Hosted blogging services tend to be the easiest to use for newcomers because they don’t require you to install anything and often automatically give you a web site for your blog to live on, but even some of the install-it-yourself options are very easy to use.
An Introduction to the Blog Format
Blog is short for “weblog”, and describes any website with a series of entries displayed in reverse-chronological order. Some bloggers describe the format as a conversation, and therefore believe that a web site is not a blog unless it allows readers to post comments. This point is debatable, and is more of a question of what the blog format has evolved into. Most early blogs did not have comments, and early versions of the Blogger service did not even have the technology to support comments.
The definition of a blog does not make any prerequisite for the subject matter of a blog. It only describes the format in which the content is presented. There are blogs about virtually every topic under the sun. People blog about their career field, their hobbies, animals, art, science, politics, and even the day-to-day events of their own lives.
How to Blog
The act of blogging is quite simple: start a web site, publish content on that web site, and present it to the reader in reverse-chronological order. Your blogging software will take care of the “reverse-chronological” bit automatically, so all you really need to concern yourself with is thinking up what to publish.
Blogging software is any system that you use to manage the content on your blog. Blogging software organizes your content, archives, categories and files, and generates the code necessary to turn that content into a navigable web site that visitors can find, browse, and possibly interact with.
There are two main types of blogging software: blogging services hosted by the people and companies that operate them, and blogging software that you download and install on your own site. The rest of this article will cover a few of the most popular options for managing a blog.
Hosted Blogging Services
Hosted blogging services are operated by the people and companies that produce them, and do not require you to install the blogging software on your own web site. You visit the site where the service is located, log in with your password, write, save and publish your content. There are two ways to publish the content that you write using one of these services: on a web site hosted by that blogging service, or on your own independent web site.
Many hosted blogging services give you a web site for your blog when you sign up. For example, you can sign up for Blogger, and choose to automatically create a site at the address http://yourname.blogspot.com. When you’re done signing up, you have both your own web site, and access to the Blogger service. When you publish content with the Blogger service, it appears on the web site located at http://yourname.blogspot.com.
Hosted blogging services can also work with your own independent web site. Let’s say that you own www.yourname.com and have already contracted a company to host that site. A service like Blogger will ask you for the username and password to www.yourname.com, and can then take the content you write in Blogger and publish it to www.yourname.com automatically.
Blogger is a service originally created by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, along with the employees of their company, Pyra. Blogger is now owned and operated by Google. When you publish a blog with Blogger, you can choose to either host your content on your own share of the blogspot.com site, or have Blogger upload your content to your own web site.
TypePad is a service from Six Apart, a company started by husband and wife team Ben and Mena Trott. TypePad is aimed at businesses and professionals, and therefore charges a fee. The cost starts at $5 per month for a one-author blog, and goes up to custom priced enterprise-level packages. When you operate your blog with TypePad, your web site is hosted on the TypePad service.
LiveJournal is a cross between a blogging service and a social network. Joining LiveJournal creates your blog, hosted on the LiveJournal site and managed by their own content management system. LiveJournal is a bit more complicated than a service that hosts blogs though — instead of acting as independent sites hosted on the same service, LiveJournal blogs aree interconnected and the bloggers that use the service frequently interact with each other, conversing on each other’s sites through comments on each other’s posts. LiveJournal is very much a community of bloggers. LiveJournal was started by Brad Fitzpatrick, and is now owned by Six Apart.
WordPress.com is another hosted blog service from Matt Mullenweg’s company, Automattic. Signing up for WordPress.com gets you access to the WordPress.com content management system, and a web site for your blog, hosted on the WordPress.com system.
Install-It-Yourself Blogging Software
If you’re technologically proficient, or know someone who is, blogging software can also be installed on your own web site. By installing your own blogging software, you are put in charge of everything. You’re responsible obtaining the web hosting, installing the software, applying updates, and most of all, it’s your mess if someone hacks in. Often times, you also have access to the source code of the application, and can install extensions for additional functionality, and even hack away at it yourself.
If you’re not scared away yet, here are a few popular blogging software packages that you can install on your own:
Before there was WordPress.com, there was the WordPress blogging software. WordPress is an easy-to-install content management system for blogs. It’s designed to be easy to use, rich in features, fast and customizable. WordPress allows third-party developers to write their own plug-ins that extend the functionality of the system beyond its “out-of-the-box” capabilities. WordPress is extremely popular in the blogging world. In fact, the very web site your are reading uses WordPress. WordPress requires a web server running PHP and MySQL.
Before there was Six Apart and TypePad, there was the Movable Type Publishing Platform. Movable Type is blogging software created by the people at SixApart. Like WordPress, Movable Type is a customizable system that supports plugin-ins written by third party developers, that extend the functionality of the system. A one-author/one-blog Movable Type setup is free, but if you want more authors or blogs, you must pay. Pricing is based on how many authors and blogs you wish to have. Movable Type requires a web serve running Perl, and supports a variety of database platforms.
Textpattern is another PHP & MySQL content management system, which claims to lend itself to “all types of web sites, including blogs”. Textpattern boasts its “Textile” system, which is very good at converting your plain text into structured markup for the Web.
Blogging’s popularity has a lot to do with how well the format lends itself to the way people consume the streams of content on the Web. If you’re a motivated writer, a curious technophile, or just curious, the various sophisticated blogging platforms mentioned in this article will get you blogging in no time.
There are many other blogging platforms in existence than we could possibly effectively cover in this article. If you’ve used a service or software package that you think rivals the suggestions here, please let our readers know in the comments. Also, don’t hesitate to comment on the blogging products that were mentioned.
