Technician Online

September 18th, 2008

Variety of blogging service providers available

It seems everyone has a blog these days. Or two or three or four.

While there are those who use Facebook notes and MySpace blogs to write about their thoughts and goings-on, there are many other (free) avenues for personal expression available on the Web. If you’re thinking about starting a blog, try one of these three options:

Blogger is perhaps the most popular of the various blogging service providers. Started by Pyra Labs in 1999, Google bought Blogger in 2006. It makes blogging fairly easy, and you can do anything from writing entries and posting photos and videos all in one interface. It offers a variety of templates, which you can easily alter to suit your tastes. You can even add and customize several types of sidebars to your blog. If you like, you can also gain some profit based on the number of people who read your blog by allowing Google’s AdSense to advertise on your page. Recently, Blogger added the ability to easily link to friends’ blogs, and you can also create multi-user group blogs. And you can comment, too.

WordPress, like Blogger, offers a simple posting process. It has features for those who know little about blogging and more options for those with more Web and blogging experience. WordPress has more than 60 themes to choose from, as well as a wealth of themes designed by other users. You get more than three gigabytes of space for all of your posts, including any media you upload. It plays well with many of the Web 2.0 sites like Flickr and del.icio.us through the use of widgets. Wordpress also supports the use of Google AdSense. You can also download a client for creating, updating and modifying your blog.

Tumblr offers a different approach to blogging, called a tumblelog. Each post takes on a different format, no matter whether you’re posting a text entry, a photo, a link, a quote, a dialogue, a video or a song. It’s something like Twitter, but it allows for more creativity and more characters. Tumblr lets you follow people and have followers, and their posts comprise your homepage. You can also reblog posts you like of those you follow for your followers to see. It offers many different layout options — all of which are cleanly designed — which you can change if you know HTML well enough.

If (or when) Facebook and MySpace are no longer cool to have, blogs will live on.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 12:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Science & Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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