Best place to start a blog?

Hikkins

Title says it all really. I'm a journalist looking to break from regular news to writing about my specialty subjects (gaming and music). I'm looking for something that's going to be very simple and easy to use.

I don't need it to look fancy or anything, it's mainly there for me to get some writing practice, and show to various editors (although it would be nice to attract a few readers in the process).

So what's the best software/site to set up a blog on? And does anyone have any tips about how best to go about writing one/attracting readers?

Cheers guys!

The_Glad_Hatter

i'm busy starting up my own blog at posterous, and i'm really liking the light layout, crossposting, heavy editability.

incredibly easy to use, and lacking features that you probably won't miss...

Posting by via email seems like something that'll make it easier for me to post...

amateurhour

You can use google blogger to get a free blog. That's the easiest way to do it and it's pretty much SEO optimized from the get go and has good adspace plugins.

Or you can get your own domain host and domain name for about $100 a year more or less and use wordpress and just have your own site, which to me is a lot better because you also get a few gigs of online storage you can use for just about anything.

Skullo

I'm a huge fan of Blogger. Easy and efficient.

ben0207

I couldn't live without Tumblr - I tried Posterous and Blogger, but:

Posterous was pretty good but Tumblr just edged it in themes and layout
Blogger was a monstrosity and I have never seen a Blogger-powered blog that I could honestly describe as attractive

BoomShake

There's also Wordpress.com that does free hosted wordpress blogs. A little restrictive, especially compared to Wordpress on it's own, but super easy to set up and go.

Quoth

I like wordpress.org because it's way more customizable than either blogger or the free version of wordpress, from what I've seen, but any of those options are fine and commonplace.

amateurhour

Honestly, if it's your first blog, use tumblr or blogger and just get the content out there. When you decide to get your own domain name and a web host you can port blogger and tumblr into wordpress and transfer all of your posts, you'll just need to fix a few links here and there.

wmelon

squarespace.com looks pretty decent too, if you're not up for hosting your own.

Davebirchall

For the sake of a $10 domain registration and $5 a month hosting, I say do it yourself and start a wordpress blog on your own domain.

It will save you a lot of work in the long run.

If you start you blog on a free provider and then decide to move it, you will have to start again in term of inbound links and reputation.

There a hosting provider that even installs for you.

http://www.bircko.com/wordpresshosting.html

Good luck

Rikushix

I like wordpress, but I've never used it.

Tumblr is my personal favourite. You could call tumblr a microblog service. Pretty simplified controls, but with HTML and CSS knowledge you can really spruce it up into a full website.

EWom

Wordpress is easy to use, has tons of themes for free and plugins, but also has a shitload of spammer bots who do nothing but spam everything in your blog with links to their mexican viagra or some shit.

As for how to attract readers, especially in 2 fields as saturated as gaming and music.. you pretty much have to work your ass off, post quality content multiple times a day, and involve the community you hope to have reading your blog, in your blog. Because if there is one thing to remember about blogs, it's that nobody gives a shit what you think.

Lux

In my experience:

Tumblr is a great blog for visuals and design. Mostly people use it for this, "microblogging" the other person spoke of; just a picture, or an audio file. It's not good for reader comments. It's more of a public onlines scrap book for sharing.

Wordpress is probably the most readable and most customizable. Their layouts are simple, put the focus on the text, popular among a lot of professional blogs.

Blogger is sort of a middle. It's customizable within their framework, and their layouts are flashier, though they do not lend themselves to big blocks of text as well as Wordpress.

Currently I use Blogger, but would rather use Wordpress if everything imported cleanly and Wordpress had some easy design tools.

baudattitude

One more vote for Wordpress, and you may as well use their hosting option if you're just building something to use as a portfolio. If you ever want to move off, there's an option to export all your posts as a massive blob of XML, and presumably you could import that into a self-hosted Wordpress blog or into some other tool, though I've never done so.

licwidcake

I have a question instead of a recommendation.

When you start a blog on a site that is not your own domain name and whatnot, do you give the rights to what you post to that site? For instance if I started writing a story or something would that site now own that story since they technically own the blog?

amateurhour

licwidcake wrote: »

I have a question instead of a recommendation.

When you start a blog on a site that is not your own domain name and whatnot, do you give the rights to what you post to that site? For instance if I started writing a story or something would that site now own that story since they technically own the blog?

If you're asking "if I start a blogger account does google own my stuff?" then the answer is no.

However, if you join a short story collective or something, make sure you read the fine print. Some of the shadier ones will let you keep the rights to your work, but they have the right to print and sell your work through their collective books without payment to you, or to put ads on your blog for whatever they want.


Also, as to the commenter above talking about wordpress spam, using the built in spam collector, or any of the dozens of plug ins, along with turning off commenting on posts older than 14 days in the settings, will stop about 99 percent of that viagra spam.

Hikkins

Having read through this and looked at a few of the sites myself - I've decided to use wordpress to start my blog.

So, follow up question: Now that I've got the thing started up, what kind of things make a good blog?

As I said in my first post, I'm using this largely for practice - but since I'm writing the thing it would be nice to maybe attract some kind of following, so in order to do so I want to be able to make it a worthwhile read.

ben0207

Hikkins wrote: »

Having read through this and looked at a few of the sites myself - I've decided to use wordpress to start my blog.

So, follow up question: Now that I've got the thing started up, what kind of things make a good blog?

As I said in my first post, I'm using this largely for practice - but since I'm writing the thing it would be nice to maybe attract some kind of following, so in order to do so I want to be able to make it a worthwhile read.

My only rule is that I write for myself and maybe other people like it. If you keep changing to suit your audience you'll either go mad or completely lose them.

shadowane

ben0207 wrote: »

Hikkins wrote: »

Having read through this and looked at a few of the sites myself - I've decided to use wordpress to start my blog.

So, follow up question: Now that I've got the thing started up, what kind of things make a good blog?

As I said in my first post, I'm using this largely for practice - but since I'm writing the thing it would be nice to maybe attract some kind of following, so in order to do so I want to be able to make it a worthwhile read.

My only rule is that I write for myself and maybe other people like it. If you keep changing to suit your audience you'll either go mad or completely lose them.

Or you just won't post because you can't think of things to write.

celandine

I'm a Wordpress partisan. (click my sig to see what I've done with it.)

Mainly because the templates are pretty and I can see very complete blog stats. Also free. Free is good.

amateurhour

Also, if you go with wordpress, be weary of the free themes. I'm all for contributing to the devs by having them linked in the footer, but a lot of "free" ones encode the footer so that you can't change it at all, and it's their own design that takes away from the look of your blog and can redirect traffic. Make sure any free template you're using is open source and can be edited.

Also, make sure you link to the theme dev if you use their theme.

JacksWastedLife

I'm partial to drupalgardens.com. It's a free hosted Drupal 7 site. Like wordpress on steroids, minus the roid rage. It's especially nice that it has a themebuilder that let's you tweak your theme in the browser without having to know any CSS

ben0207

Also, another free bit of advice: makwe sure Google Analytics etc are switched off for at least the first few months. Your viewcount will be low, but knowing precisely how low will be demoralising, and stats that show say, a particulr article being more popular than the rest could easily lead to you losing sight of your "vision" and fruitlessly chasing an audience that might not really exist.