According to my own, admittedly unscientific and cursory, search on the internet, the main blogging systems seem to be Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com. All these are hosted systems, i.e. some company does the management for you: they pay for the servers and data storage, install, run and upgrade the blogging software, and back up your blog. You just provide the content and you may customise a bit the look and structure of your blog. While Blogger and WordPress.com are free services (the latter with some paid premium add-ons), TypePad requires a subscription.
The alternative is to self-host the blogging software on some web hosting provider of your choice. In that way you have more control over the appearance and content of the blog. For example, WordPress.com only provides a fixed set of looks for your blog and it doesn’t allow blogs to embed code like Javascript or Java applets, because malicious users could write code that would break down the blogging software. This means that if you require those technologies to present some interactive web-based applications in your blog, then you must host it yourself. To do that, you can either buy a license of Movable Type (the blogging CMS behind TypePad) or freely download the open source WordPress software. (Although I read some people mentioning self-hosted Blogger blogs, I couldn’t find out how to get the Blogger CMS.)
Besides questions of free vs. paid software and where to host blogs, there are also technical and usability trade-offs between the different systems. I’ve come across one vehement defense of WordPress over TypePad, but I’m sure opposite opinions can also be found on the internet. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of taking the blog’s purpose into account: I’ve seen TypePad recommended for business users and there are several big companies using TypePad.
For my more modest goals, I decided to go with WordPress. I already had an account on a web hosting provider (but that’s another story for another time…), and hence installing this software would avoid the lock-in effect of a proprietary solution like Blogger and the constraints of a hosted service like WordPress.com.
There was a further advantage for choosing WordPress: its installation would prove to be a breeze…
Hey your this post is very interesting. One of my friend said the same thing to me the other day. I think I will think it over and get back to you. Great work!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I appreciate the time and effort you went to in order to provide valuable information, rather than much of the junk I have seen around the ‘net.
Kind regards,
Barry