Best platforms to host your Own Blog
Weblogs are an easy way to get content up on the web. Using templates, you can post to a blog quickly without knowing HTML, CSS, or design. They also offer tools like comments, automatic RSS feed generation, and much more. Using blog software to manage your website is a smart move for anyone who wants to handle a lot of regularly updating content. Blogs are one of the simplest examples of content management, as they take basic content and do things like add HTML tags and hyperlink URLs so you don't have to.
With these software programs, you'll have your blog up and running in a matter of minutes. And with the better blog software, you can create static pages and manage things like forms and other data just like a full-featured CMS.
1. WordPress
WordPress is a publishing platform that relies on PHP and a database to make your blog entries load quickly and update immediately. I love the password protected posts feature, and it is really easy to install and use.WordPress can be used for most of the blogs, and several of the non-blog websites as well. WordPress includes features like:
- Hundreds of free and paid themes to style your site
- Thousands of plugins to extend your site and make it do even more
- Static pages that are outside the blog structure, but are maintained in WordPress just like a post
- Comments, RSS and Atom feeds, and password protection on pages and posts
- Categories and tags to organize your site
- Built-in navigation and links
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools around, and because of this there are even more templates, themes, and plugins to extend your site. If you don't want to maintain your blog yourself you can use the hosted service at WordPress.com instead.
2. Movable Type
I used Movable Type for years. It is a lot more than just a blog. Instead it is a full publishing system that you can use to maintain your entire website. There are several versions of the MT software depending upon what type of license you need. Movable Type (Pro) includes features like:
- Multiple websites supported with just one installation of the MT software
- Revision history for tracking changes to pages, entries, and templates
- Custom fields let you organize and manage data on your site Build forums and other community including social media interaction
- Scalable features like Oracle Database support (MT Advanced) Open source version for developers to add even more features
3. Blogger
Blogger is an online blogging platform owned by Google. It is very easy to sign up for an account on blogger and be writing your blog in just a few minutes. Blogger is different from WordPress because it is only a blogging platform. If you want blog software to run your entire site you will need to choose something else. But Blogger, because it is owned by Google, has great integration with Google AdWords so you can easily sell advertising on your site and make a little money. Most other blog software requires that you install a plugin to use AdWords. Blogger.com is sometimes known by another name—Blogspot.com. But these both are owned by Google and point to the same blogging software.
