Welcome to part two of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Mat Bowles, advising on the technical side of getting started with a blog.
So, you’re thinking of starting a blog of your own. You could do what most people seem to do at this stage, and go sign up directly to Google’s Blogger service and just get writing. Personally, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best idea. I’m a Lib Dem, my membership card says on the back:
No one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity
Now, can’t help you out much with the first, but when it comes to blogging, I can definitely help with the second and the third. There are many different services out there that will let you host a perfectly respectable blog, many of them for free and as good, if not better, than Blogger, offering unique features that Blogger either cannot, or will not, provide. All have their strengths, and most have weaknesses. You may even be one of those that actually benefits from and is best suited to using Blogger. I won’t hold that against you. Well, not much, anyway.
Some services are completely free, others place adverts on your blog to pay for the costs. If you’re an elected politician, you might prefer not to have adverts display on your site over which you have little to no control, thus ruling out some platforms.
The purpose of this article is to help you choose between the popular free platforms, thus premium hosted services such as Dreamwidth or Typepad are not covered, and self-hosting is only touched on briefly.
Free blog services
The ‘big three’ of these are Blogger, WordPress.Com and LiveJournal.Com. In addition, popular social network sites such as MySpace.Com, Facebook.Com and Bebo.Com have a built in, limited blogging functionality; you may find these suit you more if you already have an account there.
Blogger
Undoubtedly the most popular blogging platform, Google’s Blogger platform is free, does not require you to display adverts, and offers a flexible, reliable service that fulfills the basic needs of anyone wanting a free blog.
Strengths: Large variety of templates, which can be personalised easily through a fairly straightforward menu. Advanced users can edit the template directly with their own CSS or bespoke code. Automatically optimised to have a strong search engine presence. Straightforward comments system that allows for easy subscription for logged in users, and non account holders to state their own site address, with optional restrictions on who can comment and on publication facility. Allows for easy insertion of Google adverts, which can provide a small income for regular bloggers.
Weaknesses: Limited privacy function, entire blog must be either public or private. Comments cannot be threaded and individual comments cannot be replied to directly. Comment subscription only possible for Google account users, although OpenID and anonymous commenting is supported. Frequently has comment pages display separately in a Blogger hosted page, further reducing the appearance of professionality. Cannot import directly from other blog platforms. Advanced customisations require learning a Blogger specific markup language.
Best used by: Amateur pundits who aren’t too bothered about a professional appearance and new bloggers wanting to dip their toes into the water without a major commitment.
Some other platforms do allow you to import to them from Blogger, so is a good starting point if you’re not sure whether blogging is for you.
LiveJournal.Com
Livejournal was created before the word ‘blogging’ was invented, and has always existed in a semi-detached little bubble. It offers incredibly strong privacy functions, and has a built in aggregator (“Friends Page”), creating a strong community feel. Livejournal is popular with female bloggers; 65% of users who have stated a gender being female.
Strengths: Strong privacy functions, you can choose exactly who has access to each individual post. Options to limit the search engine presence of publicly posted content. Built in aggregation and feedreading feature that is easy to use and follow. Account holders can comment easily, subscribe to entire threads and receive notifications if a comment they have made is responded to directly. Accounts can be upgraded to a premium service, removing adverts from view and allowing extra options. Account holders and OpenID users can upload a variety of icons which can be selected when posting or commenting, creating an extra visual aid for readers. Large variety of open access ‘community’ blogs allow for quick propagation of content and an easy way to find like-minded users.
Weaknesses: For technical reasons has reduced visibility within blog and web search engines. Free accounts automatically display adverts to all readers except paid LJ subscribers. For non-account holders, the OpenID functionality is very limited and unintuitive, and the ability to comment without an account or an OpenID is deliberately limited. Due to its history, Livejournal powered blogs are frequently ignored by ‘serious’ bloggers, although this attitude is changing. Poorly implemented domain mapping feature is available to paid users.
Best used by: Personal bloggers aiming at friends and family, ‘fan’ blogs about specific TV shows, people who want a personal journal locked away from the public gaze. While it can be an effective ‘broadcast’ style blog (it is the most popular blog platform in Russia, where the word for ‘blog’ is “LJ” and the President has an account, and is now used by all journalists on “The Independent”), due to its limited search visibility it is not the best option for a pundit style blog.
Due to the Friends page, livejournal subscribers to your blog are very likely to continue reading, and will be more inclined to comment. It provides a limited direct audience, but that audience is much more likely to comment and come back repeatedly, as long as you’re being interesting.
WordPress.Com
WordPress is free, Open Source software that anyone can download and install on a server to run their own blog. To cover their costs, the company creating the software also run this service, which displays a small amount of adverts to logged out readers and, while free, charges users for some extras, including appearance personalisations and use of personal URLs.
Strengths: Easy comment system, allowing for subscription and the option of threading discussions. Allows for easy import of content from most other platforms (including both Blogger and LJ). Allows for creation of ‘static’ pages easily, so you can have an ‘about me’ page, a contact page and other content linked directly from the frontpage and not hidden in your blog archive. If you buy your own web domain, this can be ‘mapped’ to WP for a fee, and then all URLs will redirect there. Good choice of appearance templates. Individual posts can be password protected so that only the title appears publicly.
Weaknesses: Colour schemes are limited to those within approved templates unless you both pay extra and know how to code CSS. Displays adverts to readers that you have no control over unless you pay a premium. After setup, needs several options changed from the default to get the best search engine visibility.
Best used by: New bloggers hoping to continue and expand, writers wanting the option of privacy in a predominantly open blog, users wanting contact pages and other easy to find static content.
Overall
In my opinion, the best all round free platform for new bloggers is WordPress.Com. I personally prefer Livejournal over Blogger, but I’ll admit to a bias – I had an LJ account before I knew what a ‘blog’ was, and met my fianceé through a conversation in a comments box there. Blogger is not a terrible platform, and for all around purposes is more than adequate, but if you don’t mind either paying of having a small number of adverts displayed, each of the other two platforms discussed is more powerful and flexible for most purposes.
One caveat: If you’re a Lib Dem Councillor and a member of ALDC, then you should strongly consider using their MyCouncillor service, which is free to members. It is powered using the WordPress software and is thus just as flexible, while also displaying syndicated news from the party ensuring there is always new content for you to discuss. Even if you don’t plan to blog regularly, ensuring your free page is up to date with contact information and links to your local party’s site is pretty much essential.
If you are planning on blogging regularly, and even if all you do is comment, an account with each of the platforms listed will make it easier for you to navigate and comment.
Above all else, don’t be daunted, and if you need any help, feel free to ask–approximately 7% of the population has a blog of some sort, odds are very good you know a few bloggers already, even if they’ve never mentioned it.
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12 Comments
Nice article, babe.
I was initially on DeadJournal (a LiveJournal clone), with a mirror on LJ, then on JournalSpace, then tried a self-hosted Serendipity blog, and am now on self-hosted WordPress (as are over a dozen sites I run). I’ve dabbled with both WordPress.com and Blogger.
So I hope I know whereof I speak.
I don’t disagree with anything Mat says up there. But there is one important point he doesn’t mention. With all three of the above options, YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR BLOG. You can be shut down with (possibly) no appeal at any moment due to cock-up or conspiracy. You probably won’t be, but you could be. As, for example, Abby Lee discovered: http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/2007/08/blocked.html. The same could happen to Iain Dale, to Paul Staines, and to most of our star Lib Dem bloggers.
So Mat’s advice is very good – but, if you find you like this blogging lark and are going to stick to it, be prepared to go it alone with something like WordPress on your own web space. Just because the big names haven’t doesn’t mean they shouldn’t.
To clarify – follow Mat’s advice when you start off. No criticism of it implied at all. But be aware that you may outgrow it after a year or two and plan accordingly.
LJ and all it’s clones and codeforks can be easily archived so you don’t lose anything, though. And then it’s just a case of re-uploading.
I think Andy’s point is nicely double-edged: if you have your data in someone else’s system, you have less control but then you also need do less to keep things running day to day. E.g. if your blog is on Blogger, Google sort out all the hosting and related jobs, but it means when Google plays up all you can do pretty much is sit back and wait.
As someone who uses Blogger can I say, I think it’s the best. Blogger gives the blogger the power to blog for free and is quiet good. You can always get a template like I have and really push the boat out.
Google are quiet good with the hostage and since starting the blog it has probably caused me trouble for about one hour on two occasions!
Andy–agree completely. There was in the first draft two paragraphs about self hosting and other options, but it wasn’t the remit, and I was waaaay over the word limit already (I was asked for 500-600 words, this is about 1500) so it got cut.
The main problems with self hosting are a) your web host could shut you down, as happened with Tim Ireland and Boris Johnson over the Craig Murray/Schillings thing, and b) you’re almost certainly paying for bandwidth, storage, etc–Charlotte Gore nearly got shut down for excessive bandwidth, LDV has had perpetual problems with paying the bills, etc.
If you’re going to try to make a punt at being a ‘serious’ blogger, or you need the site for professional/political reasons, I think you should self host, there are tricks to reduce load–Charlotte’s raving about Amazon’s storage facility for her images and scripts currently, saving her loads, but if you’re not doing a serious project, one of the above with regular backups is sufficient (although I prefer Dreamwidth to LJ, but it’s a premium service so only mentioned it briefly, it’s an actual fork of the LJ codebase, rather nifty).
Irfan–you can recommend Blogger, yes, but do you do so from experience with other platforms? I have used all three of the above for serious projects, and like all three, but of them, Blogger was the least flexible and most annoying. I’ve run a whole ‘newspaper’ style site with WP easily, Blogger doesn’t even have easy multi-author support.
There’s nothing wrong with Blogger for amateur pundits with a single-author blog, like yourself, but multi author blogs, or politicians wanting to be seen to be serious, probably ought to look at something better.
Kerry McCarthy is a politician that uses Blogger, although her blog looks bad it is run by Blogger which isn’t that bad if you come to look at it.
Blogger can achieve anything if you set your mind to it, other people (not you) claim that Blogger is unprofessional but look at my blog…
Bing bing bing. Yes, it does. A large number of politicians use blogger, frequently because they think it’s the only choice they have–I met with one MP to discuss setting up a blog and he specifically thought that he would have to have “a blogspot account” in order to have anything.
I have used Blogger, that’s been made clear. I have also used many other platforms, including both Livejournal and WordPress. I have made it clear throughout that there is nothing wrong with Blogger, but that the other two are, for most purposes, better.
No, it can’t. WordPress, for example, has a much better system for keeping track of posts by seperate authors, allows for feeds for each category, has both categories and tags in a flexible manner, whereas Bloggers implementation of ‘labels’ is limited and nowhere near as flexible.
Blogger can be hacked to do a number of things that aren’t there by default, and it can be made to look good (yours has improved in appearance a lot since I last looked), but both WP and LJ are more flexible straight out of the box, and have many more features that Blogger lacks. I can’t actually think of anything Blogger can do the other two can’t, but can think of many that Blogger can’t do the other two can.
Before repeating the same, already answered, point again, have you tried either of the other two? Can you speak of all three and review each from experience as I can? Are you even prepared to acknowledge the stated weaknesses of your preferred platform as I clearly have above?
WordPress (and other platforms) are also much better than Blogger when it comes to varying levels of moderation control over comments. Blogger only gives you some fairly blunt choices with limited information but particularly for MPs in my experience there are some big benefits from the extra controls and information WordPress gives you.
When I initiallly started blogging some years ago I used Blogger as, at the time, it seemed to be the most popular one around. When I restarted some time later I used WordPress, and I have almost no complaints, other than that it can sometimes take a while to add a popular widget to the free version. What I like about WordPress though is that quite a few templates can be customised and as you learn more you can make it look more personal and pretty professional.
Thanks for the plug for MyCouncillor!
Follow up: a friend of mine who works for a pro-blogging consultancy has told me off for not mentioning Posterous for a new blogger, I’ve never used it, but a number of friends have tried it and it seems quite easy and effective–it can also be set to transfer content to another blog easily, which is useful.
On the commenting lark, my biggest individual dislike of Blogger is the very poor way it handles comments, especially the unprofessional display of comment reply pages and the lack of threading. It is possible to install Intense Debate onto a Blogger blog, which seems to deal with these issues, but I personally dislike third party services and similar, they slow down load times.
But those of you already using Blogger and wanting to make it not-awful for the rest of the blogging world to comment might want to consider it, it seems to work well, and looks a lot better than the normal Blogger commenting function. Allowing people to comment using their Twitter ID is a very nice touch.
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[…] All but one are using Blogger, the exception being Prue with the ALDC MyCouncillor system. If you’re thinking of starting up a blog yourself, both have much to recommend them but there are a range of other strong contenders too as Mat explained last month. […]