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Day 4 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

If you have decided to create a blog instead of running a regular website, you will need to look at some of the different options available to you as far as blogging software.   This guide assumes that you will be hosting your blog yourself and will not be using a remote hosting system.   As such I don’t cover Blogger, Xanga, or Typepad

Here are some of the things that you should consider when evaluating blogging software

1. Price - Cheaper is obviously better.  Free is obviously best
2. Reliability - It won’t do to have a piece of software that crashes on you all the time.  You’ll never get anything done
3. Features - Does it have everything that you want?  Can it do everything that you’ve seen done on other blogs?

Without further delay, here are some of the top blogging candidates

1) Wordpress - Wordpress is my blogging software of choice.  It is what I use to run this blog.  Some of its advantages are that it is completely free, it is easy to install (In fact if you don’t know how to install it there are people who will do it for you… free), and it has many features you won’t find anywhere else.  As an added bonus, if you used to blog on a different site, wordpress can easily import all of your old posts.  One of the great features about wordpress are the availability of pluginsto add functionality to your blog.  Wordpress runs on PHP/mySQL and if implemented properly is very scalable and can handle a larget amount of traffic without crashing.  Additionally Wordpress has a strong community out there.  This community can help you trouble shoot your bugs, and is very active in adding new features to wordpress.

2) Movable Type - Movable type was originally release in 2001 and dominated the blogging community from 2002 - 2004.  There is a free version which can support up to 3 weblogs.  It is fairly intuitive for new users to use.  It is frequently compared in Movable Type vs. Wordpress competitions across the web.  Several of its better features are a very professional user interface and a great tagging system.  Movable type is incredible scalable and fast, and its pages seem to be loved by search engine spiders.  It may be the better software for SEO purposes.

3) Textpattern - Textpattern was written as an aid for people who wanted to run a webpage, but didn’t want to go through the trouble of learning html or CSS.  Textpattern runs on PHP and mySQL, which means that it is powerful and easy to backup.  The best feature about textpattern is Textile, which is a great tool for formatting content for users who do not know html.  It basically brings all the functionality of your wordprocessor from your computer onto the internet without making you dedicate a year to learn 5 different programming languages. It bills itself as a free, flexible, and easy to use content management system which is ideal for all websites including Blogs. Textpattern is an open source free system.

The bottom line is there are many different blogging solutions out there.  Pick one which seems right for you and go with it.