My First Blog

What is a blog:

In the most simple terms a blog is used by an individual, company or group to communicate thoughts, promote events and products or simply have an online diary. A blog can be about anything the author chooses to write about, with hopes that other will find it interesting and read it.

Blogging Tools

Before delving to deep into blogging one needs to consider some of the tools that best suits the blogger's needs, I will cover three free online blogging tools that you may wish to consider.

WordPress

word press is a free online download that you can install on your computer and upload to your website or you can publish your blog free of charge using the software at wordpress.com. Wordpress offers an easy sign up page to create a new blog. It features several templates to choose from as a main theme and you can change CSS to suite your individual needs. Wordpress also allows you to insert other types of media such as Images, Audio, Video and Polls with a simple click.

Wordpress also includes Dashboard that is the control center for your blog, there you can view your blogs stats and quickly add new content to your pages. It also allows you to edit in HTML mode and you can highlight text and with a click apply certain HTML tags. All media uploaded to your blog has to be under 3.0 GB total, however if you need more space it can be purchased for a an for a fee. It also give the user the ability of using trackback and pingback as a means of linking to other blogs to increase traffic your blog. The interface offers a lot to user but it takes getting use to. I found loading an image or placing media is not strait forth and requires a little figuring out.

LiveJournal

Live Journal is also free online at livejournal.com. You can use live journal in many ways; as a private journal, a blog, a discussion forum or a social network. Live Journal offers a quick sign up with minimal information. The interface is nice and allows you to edit your post in either rich text or html, the editor allows to add images and other types of media to your blog. One of the nice options in Live Journal is a menu below the editor that you can select the configuration of the posts. You can allow comments and even screen comments, insert tags for your journal for search engine optimization and configure who can view you blog.

Live Journal also allows several ways to post to your blog, Bookmarklet, Downloading from a client, IM posting, Voice Posting, Mobile Posting and Polls. You can use custom CSS to style your journal to fit your needs or choose from a wide range of templates they provide. I find that Live Journal is easy to use and provides some nice features to use. It's not the heftiest blog tool on the market but it's free and will give you all you need for your blogging needs.

Blogger



Finally I will talk about Blogger from blogger.com. This software is easy to use and if you have a google email account then your already able to use their site. The sign up is quick and they offer easy to use template to style the blog to your needs. The editor is painless and allows you to edit in html and compose mode and use custom css to style your pages if you so choose to. You can choose if you want to allow comments to your blog or not. Blogger also allows the user to insert images and video and other media to your blog, and the editor is very easy to understand even if your a novice in html.

My Results on Blogging Tools

My research has concluded that most blogging system offer the same thing in one way or another, the editor seem to be pretty much the same from one to the other with only a little difference here and there. The main thing is now what your going to be blogging about and choose the one that is right for you and that you feel comfortable with, you know some like Fords and others like Toyota's. I choose Blogger, not that it's really any better than the other but because for me it was the easiest to understand from a beginners blogger point of view. I'm ready to start blogging the only question is, is blogging ready for me? Only time will tell.