Technorati top 100 Blog PlatformsBlogs make it easy for website publishers to create content. Most blogging software makes it ridiculously simple to add links and images without the content creator possessing considerable knowledge of HTML. Some blogging platforms are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, but without the miscellaneous extraneous code. In other words, blogging software makes content updates really easy.
Additional benefits of blogs include the integration of RSS without the overhead of setting up syndication channels yourself. The biggest benefit, though, is probably the built-in software that contacts a variety of servers (specified by you, often provided by the blog software) and informs them that content has been updated. This action, called pinging, occurs when a new update is pushed out by publishers. When blogs ping servers, the servers get a notification that your blog has published new content - and almost immediately, search engines may begin to crawl (or "spider") your blog in an effort to index the content. (In fact, even content on small blogs has been known to get spidered within an hour of publication.) Furthermore, once a blog post is published and a ping is sent to servers, aggregators are updated and show your readers the most recent content. In other words, blogging is like instantaneous publishing without the need to hit Shift-Refresh to see the page or to find the information.
In stark contrast, static websites don't come with RSS features or pinging services. If you update content, you may have to wait until the spider finds you and then crawls your content. That can take weeks or months, depending on the frequency of your website updates. With blogging software, your content crawl time is expedited.
There are a variety of blog platforms available. Some are free but require your own maintenance. Others are free but are hosted on a centralized server and give you little administrative control over the backend. Yet others are full-fledged paid solutions that boast security updates (and are not as often hacked because they are not dominant players in the blogging market). For low maintenance but high cost, the following blog platforms may be a solution you're seeking:
WordPress (wordpress.org) is by far one of the most popular blogging platforms available. It is probably the most customizable of the blogging bunch and has hundreds of thousands of developers behind plugin and theme development. WordPress is a download that must be installed and maintained on your web host, but at that point, it is completely modifiable. In fact, some websites are powered by WordPress and don't even look like blogs.
WordPress (wordpress.com), not to be confused with WordPress.org, is a hosted solution on WordPress's site for those who do not have their own domain and hosting solutions. Interested parties can sign up to wordpress.com and get blog running in seconds on a domain similar to mysite.wordpress.com. However, because the solution is hosted on WordPress's servers, you have a lot of less flexibility in customization, plugins, and theme support. If you choose to move your site from wordpress.com to a self-hosted site using wordpress.org, you will not be able to 301 redirect those links to the new blog as you do not have administrative control over the wordpress.com servers. Keep this in mind should you choose to use a free solution and then move to a self-maintained solution.
MovableType (movabletype.com) is a professional publishing platform and requires a local download. It features multiple weblogs, which is especially useful for managing several blogs from one interface. It also offers customizable templates, user management, tagging, file management, and more. Contrary to WordPress which is hosted with PHP and MySQL, MovableType is a Perl-based solution with most (if not all) of the same features offered by WordPress and support for MySQL, Berkeley DB, PostgresSQL, or SQLite. Interestingly, MovableType offers static page generation, dynamic page generation, or a combination of both.
TypePad (typepad.com) is the hosted version of MovableType which does not require your own hosting. The TypePad interface is very much like MovableType (as it's owned and operated by the same company, Six Apart), and costs between $4.95 a month (for the basic version) and $89.95 (for the business class version). The basic version enables a single blogger to maintain one blog, unlimited photo albums, and more. However, it doesn't allow you to map your URL (which will likely be something like myname.typepad.com) to your domain name, as that is a feature that is offered in the next pricing level. Ideally, having your own domain name is most optimal, so this is a consideration you should make early. If you end up moving to another host and opt in for your own self-maintained blogger solution, you won't be able to implement 301 redirects (if necessary) unless you start with your own domain name. Also, the link value will not be maintained when you do make the switch.
Blogger (blogger.com) is Google's hosted blogging solution and allows users to set up blogs using a subdomain on blogspot.com. Blogger is most popular for those who are not in need of much modification, because there's less control over the hosted solution. You will be unable to specify 301 redirects, for example, when you move to another domain. Additionally, you won't have full control over your meta tags without modifying the code first. Bear in mind that a large percentage of Blogspot blogs are used for spammy purposes, so you might want to diversify by using another platform.
ExpressionEngine (expressionengine.com) is another blog publishing application that gives you a lot of customization, control, and first-class support (which is useful as the license is $99.95 for the personal solution or $249.95 for the commercial solution). ExpressionEngine advertises a complete set of web publishing packages, a powerful template engine, an integrated mailing list, powerful spam deterrents, tracking, plugins, built in utilities, and more.
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