Blogging Software

Blogging Software - Today, there is a lot of free blog software available out there – if you want a blog, you are literally spoiled for choice. What you get will depend on how comfortable you are with technical stuff, and whether you want it to be part of your main website or not.

Movable Type - This is software that you install on your web server. You simply log in and type your post, and it creates your pages for you. Movable Type can be a little complex to set up, but you can use a version called Typepad that is hosted by its creators instead of using your server.

Blogger - You don’t install Blogger on your server – instead, you give it your FTP password and let it upload files to your web server for you. If you don’t have any hosting, you can also host blogs for free at Blogger’s Blogspot. Blogger is owned by Google.

WordPress - WordPress is a free alternative to blogging software. It works in basically the same way as Movable Type, but without the restrictive licensing and with nicer-looking default templates. Many people have switched to WordPress out of frustration with Movable Type and not looked back. You have to host it on your own server, but it’s very simple to set up – don’t be scared!

TypePad - is a blogging service from company Six Apart Ltd, and the largest paid blogging service in the world. …

LiveJournal - LiveJournal is a completely online service, meaning that it has nothing to do with your website, except that you can link to your LiveJournal if you want. LiveJournal is more social than most blogging, allowing you to join communities relating to your interest.

There are plenty of other online services, but they’re all pretty much the same: MSN Spaces, AOL Journals, and so on. You’re unlikely to get taken very seriously if you have a blog at any of these places, although it’d be easy.

In the end, it’s all about power versus convenience: the more work you put in to get your blog working, the more likely that it’s going to be what you really wanted it to be. If you’re creating a website anyway, you’d be silly not to put a blog on it.

Tags: blog, Blogger, Blogging Software, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, WordPress

Types of Blogs

Types of Blogs - There are several types or uses of blogs and weblogs:

Personal - Often, the word is used to describe an online diary or journal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease.

People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute. Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs.

Topical - Another common type is the topical blog. It focuses on a specific niche, often a technical one. An example is a Google Blog covering nothing but Google news.

Thoughtful - Where a Personal weblog is primarily concerned with daily life and events, and many topical ones focus on some technical topic, those in the “thoughtful” category present an individual’s (or a small group’s) thoughts on whatever subject comes to hand; not necessarily the latest computer technology or the latest political scandal, but typically less contingent and more philosophical subjects.

FriendBlog - A FriendBlog is a distributed networked journal on the web, composed of short, frequently updated posts written by friends connected through their similar interests. The author allows his FriendBlog to connect to other FriendBlogs, belonging to friends and acquaintances, and by doing so, their posts also appears in his.

Collaborative - which is written by more than one person about a specific topic. It can be either open to everyone or limited to a group of people. A new form of blog involves cooperation between bloggers and traditional media sources.

Political - Another common type is a political blog. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Many of these comment on whatever interests the author. Some of them are more specialized. One subspecies is the watch blog which sets out to criticize what the author considers systematic errors or bias in an online newspaper or news site - or perhaps even by a more popular blogger.

Directory - Directory weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs can fall into this category or the previous one.

Corporate - Increasingly, employees of corporations are posting official or semi-official blogs about their work.

Formats - Some weblogs specialise in particular forms of presentation, such as images or videos or on a particular theme, and acronyms have been developed for some of these, such as moblogs.

MP3 blog - One of the types of blog that has undergone rapid expansion since the turn of the millenium is the MP3 blog, which make audio files available to the user.

Tags: blog, Blog or Blogging, Directory weblogs, FriendBlog, MP3 blog, niche, political blog, topical blog, Types of Blogs, weblogs

Blog or Blogging

Blog or Blogging is a web application containing periodic postings on a common webpage, usually accessible to any Internet user, in reverse date order i.e. the latest date or posting is listed first.

The term came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server.

The format varies from a simple bullet lists of hyperlinks to article summaries with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual postings or entries are almost always date and time-stamped, with the newest post at the top of the page.

Because links are so important to Blogging, most of them have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for individual entries.

Many also allow visitors to leave public comments, which have led to a community of readers centered around the blog. Others are non-interactive.

The totality of blogging or blog-related websites is usually called the blogosphere.

Creating and Publishing Blogs - Since their introduction, a number of software packages have appeared to allow individuals to create their own blog and Blog hosting sites and Web services to provide editing via the Web have proliferated. Many more advanced bloggers prefer to generate their blogs by using server-side software tools to publish on their own Web site or a third party site, or to host a group of blogs for a company or school. Such programs provide greater flexibility and power, but require more knowledge.

In addition, some people program their own blogs from scratch by using php, cgi, or other server side software. While these are much more difficult to create, they add a maximum potential for creativity.

Tags: blog, Blog or Blogging, Blogging, blogosphere, web, webpage