Blog software/hosting recommendations?

Post #304,860 by Silverlock 2/28/09 2:51:36 PM Reply	Blog software/hosting recommendations? A friend wants to hire me to setup a web page and a couple of blog sites. I think it will be good for me to learn about this stuff. Any recommendations for a beginner? The blogs should be novice friendly as the lady I am doing this for doesn't want to learn html/etc. Just wants to post occasional text with a few pics/graphs/charts. One blog will be for eco stuff with a focus on coral reef destruction and the other blog will be an educators site on diversity/women's issues in academia (if the content makes a difference in the choice of tools). From what I've seen so far with a little googling, it looks like Blogger is probably the way to go.
Post #304,861 by Another Scott 2/28/09 3:12:29 PM Reply	Blogger seems to be extremely popular. Drew uses it - http://blog.cooklikeyourgrandmother.com/ Please let us know what you go with. Cheers, Scott. (Who toys with the idea of setting up something every once in a while...)
Post #304,867 by drook 2/28/09 9:29:09 PM Reply	Pros / cons Blogger is dead simple to set up and use. Pretty trivial to set up with your own URL, too. If you're happy with one of the default themes there's not much you could do to make it easier. But someone else owns your content. (Possession being 9/10ths and all.) If you want to self-host so you're in charge of your own destiny, you want Wordpress. There's also a lot more widgets and plugins available for Wordpress. So Blogger achieves a shallower learning curve by having a more limited feature set. Compromise solution: Start with Blogger. When/if you outgrow it, you can import the whole site into Wordpress. Problems with this are that any internal links break in the import. So the longer you go with Blogger the more you're going to have to fix up. This is very much on my mind as I'm about to do the conversion. Either way, I recommend hosting your photos on your own site and linking to them. If you import them into the blog they get resized according to default values and you end up with auto-generated URLs to the images. I've written a set of bash scripts to process directories of photos and generate sm/med/lg versions, generate HTML for cut/paste into the blog, and upload the whole mess to my site. Let me know if you're interested in the scripts. Everything's hardcoded, but really simple to edit. -- Drew
Post #305,221 by Another Scott 3/8/09 10:18:29 AM Reply	What about TypePad? The Atlantic uses it (or at least Sullivan does). Naturally their comparison matrix makes them look pretty good: http://www.typepad.c...s-vs-blogger.html Cheers, Scott. (Who has no time for doing stuff like this but lets it rattle around in his brain anyway. And who wonders whether it's time to read GTD again...)
Post #305,238 by drook 3/8/09 9:12:25 PM Reply	That comparison chart is pretty accurate If you really want someone else to deal with the hosting, that seems to be a better option. Mostly because they have support available that you just won't find for Blogger. But it seems to me once I get to the point of paying for the blog, I might as well pay for hosting instead. And once I do that I can install WordPress and self-host. Whether that's a good thing or bad depends on how you feel about added control vs. added responsibility. If you know that someone else -- anyone else -- will do a better job of maintaining and backing up your system than you would do yourself, you might be better paying for TypePad. If you're already paying for hosting, then you've got more flexibility and control with WordPress. Oh, and if you host on TypePad (or Blogger or WordPress.com) you don't have to worry about traffic when you get Dugg. -- Drew

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