Blogging 101: Which Blogging Software Do I Choose?

We all know that blogs and blogging are a shockingly effective means of sharing your most ingenious thoughts and building or participating in online communities.

Right. You got that message a while back. But considering that there are a number of options to choose from, the final step of getting going can still seem a touch daunting. We've put in a little spadework and here's a quick guide through the woods for the rest of us.

At the outset, it's important to ask yourself a few key questions. For example:

• How and why am I going to blog?
• Is this going to be a large blog with more than one contributor or will it just be me?
• Do I want to make money with the thing?
• How much of the techy details do I want to fiddle with or know about?

With these thoughts in hand, it's time to figure out which tool you should pull from the shed.

There are a variety of options. The first thing to decide is if you want a blog that is hosted by a third party or if you want to download, install, config and manage it yourself.

Self Hosted Blogging Options

Self-hosted blogs involve purchasing a hosting account, installing the blog software and configuring the system yourself. Generally, self-hosted is the way to go with blogs that may evolve into a more professional nature over time. This is due to the fact that by owning and managing the software yourself, you have much greater range of control over the system and how it operates. However this approach does tend to involve additional costs, and it requires that you either hire a consultant or have the required technical skills yourself.

Movable Type

Movable Type (MT), while it did not make the Webware Top 100 it did score a solid second place in Technorati’s top 100 blogs list, with 16 of the top 100 blogs being run on MT.

Custom Fields Separate MT from WordPress
As one of WordPress’s largest competitors, MT offers three versions: an open source version, a commercial version and a personal version. The open source option is obviously what it says it is. This is where Movable Type starts to differ from WordPress. You can only use custom fields with the commercial version, whereas with WordPress custom fields are part of the open source core code.

MT as a Web Publishing Platform
This starts to take Movable Type away from being just a blogging platform and pushes into the realm of web publishing. Much like the magazine style themes have done for WordPress, additions with the recent 4.1 release of Movable Type make it a platform for businesses that publish content in large quantities and want to customize the ways that content is displayed individually.

See the Dashboard:

MT's Support for Business Solutions
If a business is what you are looking to do then Movable Type maybe your solution. Being that they have a paid for version, they are able to offer some things that a purely open source platform does not. Namely, directly through their site they offer a guide to business blogging from Six Apart, Movable Type’s parent company. They offer a variety of other solutions for business owners, which are exclusively available to the paying customer.

WordPress

WordPress is open source and is the foremost blogging platform of the moment, having recently been the only self-hosted, open source blogging platform to make the Webware Top 100 list.

Blogging 101: Which Blogging Software Do I Choose?

We all know that blogs and blogging are a shockingly effective means of sharing your most ingenious thoughts and building or participating in online communities. \n\nRight. You got that message a while back. But considering that there are a number of options to choose from, the final step of getting going can still seem a touch daunting. We've put in a little spadework and here's a quick guide through the woods for the rest of us.

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