Nov 10

WordPress.com is a free WordPress-powered weblog hosting from company Automattic. It opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 1,115,004 accounts with the service. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if the blog owner wanted to do so; but registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features (current as of May 2006) of the site are free-to-use, and will remain so in future. However, some new features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available only to users who pay for them.

 

 

Features

  1. Support public blog and private blog (viewer by invitation only)

  2. offer paid upgrade including features of domain mapping, increase storage and CSS editor function

  3. About 60 attractive themes to choose from

  4. support sidebar widget, where you can customize and arrange some themes let you upload your own photo for the header bar

  5. support global tagging and tag surfer

  6. built in stats

  7. easily integrate images from Flickr and Photobucket

  8. include an inline spell-checker

  9. provide preview feature that shows you exactly what your post or page will look like before you publish them for the world to see.

  10. Automatic save feature (it saves your post every minute while you are writing it)

  11. Got the “page” feature which is not available at Blogger.com. Because of the simple page features, WordPress can be used to manage and built a regular website.

  12. Automatic Spam protection

  13. Provide import and export feature, which allows you to import posts from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and others.

  14. Support multiple blogs and multiple authors

 

More about the features of WordPress.com

Learn more about the features which are loved the most by user

Pros

  1. It’s free

  2. They take care of blog setup, backup, security and upgrades, so you don’t need any technical knowledge.

  3. Your posts will be included in the global tag system, where other WordPress.com user can use the same tag to find your blog post. This means extra traffic within a big community.

Cons

  1. They won’t let you monetize your blog. Although there are news about the future upgrade option that let you display your own ads, but it is yet implemented.

  2. The number of themes to choose from for your blog are limited.

  3. Your blog url contains the *.wordpress.com suffix.

 

If you don’t intend to monetize your blog, WordPress.com is probably the best free hosted platform available now. If making money is one of your goal of active blogging, you should learn how to host your own blog at paid server.

 

I’ve used Wordpress.com and Blogger.com to blog. My vote is for WordPress.

 

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Nov 8

Blogger is a blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003.

History

  • On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format.

  • In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features that Pyra charged for to be free. About a year later, Pyra Labs’ co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google.

  • In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

  • On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email.

  • On 14 August 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed Invader, alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers, as well including some new features.

  • In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta.

  • As of May 2007, Blogger has completely moved over to Google operated servers.

 

 

Features

Blogs can either be hosted internally by Blogger on the

  • blogspot.com Internet domain, (i.e. http://yourblog.blogspot.com)

  • on a user’s own domain, or

  • externally on the user’s own server (through FTP or SFTP).

Once a blog name has been reserved, the name assignment and any contents are retained for an indefinite time—there is no need to login periodically or take any action to keep the blog active. Blogger’s blogs also support HTML, so Youtube videos can be posted.

 

Redesign

As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user’s Google Account are located on Google servers. The service is now claimed to be more reliable, due to the quality of the servers.

Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files.

Integration

  • The Google Toolbar has a feature called “BlogThis!” which allows toolbar users with Blogger accounts to post links directly to their blogs.

  • “Blogger for Word” is a free add-in for Microsoft Word. This add-in allows users to save a Microsoft Word Document directly to a Blogger blog, as well as edit their posts both on- and offline. As of January 2007, Google says “Blogger for Word is not currently compatible with the new version of Blogger”, and they state no decision has been made about supporting it with the new Blogger. However, Microsoft Office 2007 adds native support for a variety of blogging systems, including Blogger.

  • Blogger supports Google’s AdSense service as a simple way of generating revenue from running a blog.

  • Blogger offers multiple author support, making it possible to establish group blogs.

 

 

Pros

  1. It’s free
  2. Hundreds of free templates
  3. Can modify your blog using html and CSS
  4. Can insert other parties widgets which is in html code (visitor counters etc)
  5. easy indexing – it ranks high on Google Blog Search
  6. even though it is free, you can still monetize it with advertisement. The easiest to integrate is Google Adsense.
  7. You don’t have to learn a lot of coding stuff to use Blogger

Cons

  1. Even though it has lots of features, but there are other platform that provides even better flexibility, such as Wordpress
  2. Less configurable
  3. default design limitation
  4. less control
  5. generic url
  6. upgrading to standalone blog can be tricky

 

Criticisms

In order to upgrade to the new Blogger service (which has new features and more reliability), a user would have to create a Google Account. There is also a petition to change the abandoned blog policy, which does not allow blogspot.com addresses to expire, preventing new users from taking abandoned addresses.Even though Blogger is owned by Google, which is primarily a search engine, the contents of the blogs are mostly not indexed by the main search engine, but only by the more specialized “Blog Search” feature.

 

How to Create a Blog Using Blogger

  1. Visit Blogger.com homepage
  2. You need a Google account to register a blog.
  3. Choose a name for your blog
  4. Choose the template
  5. Done! Start blogging!

You won’t be lost. Don’t worry.

 

 

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