Good Sites to Blog

[Quickened]

I know that there are numerous sites out there that people use to blog. I am familiar with Xanga as i used it once long ago. I know that numerous people here may use blogs so i would like to get your opinion.

What do you like about your site?
What company/site would you stay away from?

 

[Herald]

Use the Puritan Board to blog!

 

[greenbaggins]

Wordpress is the best, hands down. It is easy to use, easy to navigate, has great site stats built in, all the best features, such as pingback. Furthermore, it has the flexibility to do whatever you want. If you want your own look, then you get a wordpress.org blog, which allows you to fiddle with the template. If you don't need to do that, then go with a wordpress.com blog, which uses their server (the org blog uses your computer as a server). I used blogger, but it isn't reliable, and it is counter-intuitive to use.

 

[No Longer A Libertine]

Man, I misread your thread title like none other, first glance told my eyes it was called "God cites a Blog", I had no idea He was on-line.

 

[Quickened]

Wordpress is the best, hands down. It is easy to use, easy to navigate, has great site stats built in, all the best features, such as pingback. Furthermore, it has the flexibility to do whatever you want. If you want your own look, then you get a wordpress.org blog, which allows you to fiddle with the template. If you don't need to do that, then go with a wordpress.com blog, which uses their server (the org blog uses your computer as a server). I used blogger, but it isn't reliable, and it is counter-intuitive to use.

Is their a variety of templates? I would like to do a look that is semi original at least. I forgot how to do HTML work so i was hoping for good templates

That and i was thinking of doing my own domain name. I assume wordpress would offer that for a price?

 

[Quickened]

Man, I misread your thread title like none other, first glance told my eyes it was called "God cites a Blog", I had no idea He was on-line.

ahaah! My eyes play little tricks on me aswell.

 

[greenbaggins]

There are currently 66 different templates on offer for a wordpress.com blog. They offer quite a variety. Of course, there are now over 2.3 million wordpress blogs out there. Still, in the circles in which we move, it is unlikely that you will have problems on the originality score. Still, if you don't like that, then you can do a wordpress.org blog, which will allow you to have any template you want. The domain name for a wordpress.com blog looks like this: http:// your domain name dot wordpress dot com. The domain name is up for grabs if you do a wordpress.org blog.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

The reliability issues with Blogger have improved form what I can see. You are able to use custom domains with Blogger (in fact, I have "re-branded" a number of them).

It really depends on what you want to do. Honestly, when it comes right down to it, most blogs are hardly read at all. They are primarily online diaries as much as anything these days. A lot of people like all the features of Wordpress but they are really filled with a ton of bells and whistles that the person has installed that they and one or two others are going to use.

Lane is a good example of somebody who has built a pretty popular blog on wordpress.com but he's also got a bit of a problem if he ever decides he wants to break away or gets "bigger" than what Wordpress offers because his domain is popular at a wordpress.com subdomain. That doesn't mean that he couldn't close shop and set up somewhere else and say "I've moved here..." but it is a bit of an issue.

I have done a bit of work with some large blogging sites that thought about going the way of providing some sort of wiki functionality for what they've been posting for the last couple of years. After awhile the number of articles they've written becomes a pretty large corpus that is not always well organized or "searchable" by visitors.

When sites start getting kind of big, the needs of the site all sort of start becoming identical even when they start out in one direction. A forum site like this starts to become a resource for people and they want a place to drop their own articles. vBulletin created a blogging capability so that's built in now. I've also added an article type of system. Still, in the end, this site is popular for the discussions and the resource aspect kind of suffers because the exact information that you're searching for might get buried in a list of topics as well as in the middle of a bunch of posts (or even jokes that emerge in the middle of a conversation). Honestly, I have no idea how Andrew, for instance, seems to keep track of where those interesting conversations are.

But then go back to a site like GreenBaggins. It gets so large that the comments section takes on a "forum-like" aspect to it but you can kind of see how unwieldy it is to try to have threaded conversations there especially when there isn't a way to really split off the conversation when the comments are really getting off-topic. Hence, some people have tried to integrate forum-like capabilities into Wordpress.

I've worked with a few different types of Content Management Systems: Scoop, Drupal, and Joomla. These apps try to combine all the functions of a basic content site: forum, blogs, articles and provide a vehicle for all of them to work together on a single platform. None are perfect but I think Joomla has the most promise. I currently use Drupal at Solideogloria.com and Websitemaven.com but the support on those products and the plugins is kind of poor so I've been trying to find the time to transition to Joomla which has a better community behind it. I just don't have a lot of time for the project.

I've even worked with Fred Greco to try to create a CMS-like functionality for his Church website. He can go into detail on some of the challenges of getting a wordpress site (wordpress.org) to work for his Church site. He uses it as a combination website for his Church as well as a place where he can blog. Important to him (and many) is how easy the backend of the system is to be able to produce both regular pages and blog pages as well as for others to be able to use.

Anyway, this is probably information overload. Where you're going with your blog really will determine what you might want to consider using starting out. I would generally recommend against blogging at wordpress.com simply because you're kind of locking yourself into wordpress unless you don't mind leaving your sub-domain later and having to post a "we've moved" sign on your blog.

Honestly, though, I've seen hugely successful blogs at Blogger, Wordpress, and Xanga and if plain old blogging is your thing then any of the three is fine.

 

[biblicalthought]

Wordpress...

 

[Quickened]

Thanks for taking the time to type that up Rich.

The blog is not the main aspect but one that i wanted to consider. I am toying around with other aspects of the "what" of the website. Features that i want to include and all that. The thing is.... its been easily over a decade since i last attempted something like this. Back then i knew HTML. Now i cant remember a thing. I am starting all over.

Also i never used WYSIWYG. It was all coding (trial and error). So i am definately starting from the ground up.

I did have some motavation today but overall i think i am going to create content offline and then later on in the future i could upload the whole thing. I am sure its going to be a slow going process but thats ok!

I appreciate the insight everyone has offered. It definately gives me something to ponder.