Blogging Software

It is hard to believe it, but blogging is now a full time profession for some people. Darren Rowse of Problogger claims to generate a six figure income (in Australian dollars) from blogging. Now if you are or aspire to be a superstar of the blogosphere you need to give serious thought to how you go about publishing your material.

For most of us though, blogging is a bit of a sideline. If you just want somewhere on line to vent your opinions, keep the family up to date with what you are doing or just keep a diary that you won't lose down the back of a sofa, it probably isn't that important.

There are three options I have investigated. This blog is done in Blogger, Google's free blogging platform. This is so easy to use I can't find anything wrong with it. You sign up, follow the on-screen instructions and you can have a blog going in 10 minutes flat. Blogger is very basic but it does everything that most blogs need. It is also easy to keep track of multiple blogs. You can use the software on Google's own platform or you can use it to publish blogs that you host yourself.

If you need more control, then Wordpress is another reasonable option. There is a learning curve with Wordpress but it isn't impossible to get a blog in reasonable shape and online in less than half an hour. There are many extensions to Wordpress which seem to allow a very wide range of blogs to be produced. If you positively like tinkering with things, get over to Wordpress.org now. If you don't mind putting some effort into understanding the software you are using it is a very viable option.

If you are thinking of a blog that has aspirations to become a bit of a more serious website that is more than just a platform for your individual self-expression then you might consider Joomla. Joomla is a serious content management system and you shouldn't touch it unless you are prepared some serious time into learning how to use it. Having said that, I have a feeling that if you generate a lot of valuable content that you want to keep available to users for some time to come I have a feeling that starting with Joomla might be easier than extracting a lot of stuff from Blogger or Wordpress in the future.

I don't think you can say that Wordpress is better than Blogger, or Joomla is better than Wordpress. It depends what you want to do with them.

I will share more about all of these options in future blogs.

Why use free software?

The obvious answer to this is because it is free. This is the wrong answer. Time is money. Free software that costs you time is expensive. Paid for software that saves you time is cheap. If you use software for something that is critical to your life you should not bat an eyelid at paying for it unless you are so broke that you literally can't afford anything. If this is my philosophy, why have I started a blog on free software? The reason is that there are times when you need some software to do a quick job, or a job that you do infrequently, or a job that you would just like to do but which isn't really that important. And for this situation it is likely that there is a free option around. The classic case is Photoshop. If you are a serious graphic artist you are going to want to have the up to date version of Photoshop to help you create the images that are important to you. If you want to fiddle around a bit and come up with something to brighten up a community newsletter, you don't. In fact you won't even need 90% of the functions of Gimp. But as you don't need to pay for Gimp, in this case it is clearly a better option. It so happens that I am often in the position of wanting to do something as a one off and I have a bit of a weakness for trying out new bits of software. On this blog I intend to share some of my experiences with free software from the point of view of someone who just wants to quickly fiddle with something. I hope you find it useful.