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.