August 03, 2006

Curious George: Which blog? In yesterday's thread, we found that several of us monkeys are planning to cut loose from the man for a while. So, what blog host would you use to chronicle such an adventure?

I did some research yesterday -- there's a gazillion of 'em. Are any of them better than others? Volumes of "terms of service agreements" later, I still haven't made up my mind.

posted by stomper 18 years ago
  • Woops. it wasn't yesterday yet.
  • I would avoid using Blogger if I were you. I just switched from Blogger to WordPress. Blogger is so jampacked, I get the feeling it's gonna go kablooey any minute now. It's often down and often takes a god's age to load a photo. Of course, I'm talking about the simple and free blog hosting companies for HTML-morons like myself. If you're savvier than that and wish to pay, can't help you out there.
  • I second Wordpress. The only problem is that you need to find hosting for it, but that's fairly cheap. It's very customisable, even using an existing template, if you're willing to tweak stylesheets and HTML. Flickr serves well for photo hosting and you can write an entry to accompany a flickr photo and send it off to your blog from there.
  • I switched from MovableType to WP, by the way, because spam was getting insane. Wordpress has more inbuilt options for preventing spam than MT (although you can download a few scripts), but spammers really target blogs. I have two WP blogs, the MoFi one and a personal one, and the MoFi one requires commenters to create an account and have their first comment approved. The personal one only has an approval process if a comment has more than one URL in it, and a lot of spam slips through -- maybe half a dozen a day.
  • requires commenters to create an account and have their first comment approved. I always wondered about this, isn't this more onerous on the commenter than using those capcha thingies to check that the posting entity is human and not a machine?
  • Oops, yeah, I am being hosted by someone for free; I admit, I didn't realize WordPress needed a host until Tracicle mentioned it. Duh.
  • I Love Blogger. And Livejournal. And I use both. But I have a weblog one my own domain, running on Textpattern, which I am very happy with.
  • Also, I prefer this list of blog software.
  • Wordpress is pretty good - don't forget there's the free version at Wordpress.com - not so customisable. But free.
  • Ask our very own Wolof some time about wordpress.com.
  • Is this your first time blogging? You might want to try a free service like Blogger first to see how you go. Blogger is about the only free service where yo have a lot of control over the customization. Then perhaps when you get into my stride perhaps looking at hosting your own set up on a server. (And just export and import the entries from Blogger to your new blog). You haven't mentioned what tech skills you have so that might affect your choice too.
  • Quite topically, my blog is about my own forced adventure of sticking it to the man and living outside the system. I run it on WordPress on some pilfered server space, so it's free as long as my bandwidth doesn't go bonkers. WP quite the nice bit of code and there's tons of themes and plugins for it so you don't need to be a genius to make it do cool tricks. Though, I didn't set mine up and do the initial install. It's supposed to be easy though. For what it's worth I have my comments go into holding if it's from a new IP address then once approved future comments get through automatically. It's working for now. Plus, I rather like reading all the comments so I see each one before long and prune as needed. Are all the cool kids using WordPress these days? We're seeming pretty unanimous here.
  • Well Wordpress has been having a lot of security issues of late. I've modded a few WP blogs, and there are some good plugins, but the interface still seems kludgy to me. Expression Engine is my favourite at the moment.
  • I like Deadjournal, but only because it's like livejournal, but more exclusive. The options are limited in some places, but it's well-rounded.
  • So I understand that the kool kids are using a pay-for-it host, and installing their own blog engines? Hmmm... what I'm hoping for is (of course) everything free. One of those live-journal type of sites. I wonder if I'll have to bite the bullet and shell out $35/year for a domain and space.
  • Livejournal's got plenty of customization even at the free level, and almost no spam (I've only heard of it happening a couple times, never to me or anyone I know). It's easy to use. You can make a community journal that allows a group of people posting access. There's a bunch of Monkeys on LJ, too.