Blogging Blog

There are quite a few blogging platforms to choose from today. How do you as a new blogger know which one is best? Here I’ll cover what I consider to be the “big three” - Blogger, Wordpress, and Movable Type. There are pros and cons to each one, and I’ll try to cover the important ones here.

• Blogger -the easiest if you’re brand new. You don’t have to buy a domain, set up hosting, or know any funny PHP or CGl. Simply sign up and you’re blogging within 5 minutes. Sounds great! Then are some drawbacks to it though. You don’t have the level of control that you would have on your own domain, and there’s no built-in support for categories. Blogger could even shut your blog down without notice- and all your hard work would be lost.

• Movable Type-the top choice to control multiple blogs from one spot. The free version allows unlimited blogs under one login, so you can sure save some headaches if you run several blogs. The bad part? Movable Type is rather difficult to set up. You need a domain, hosting, and the knowledge of a CGl-bin. Rebuilds take forever on a large blog, and plugins are difficult to use. There is also a poor theme system in the current version, so changing the look and feel of your Movable Type blog is not intuitive.

• Wordpress - My current favorite, and probably the fastest growing platform. PHP based, Wordpress has no lengthy rebuilds -all your pages are generated on the fly. This does mean, however, that pages load a touch more slowly than a Movable Type page. The plugin system is simple, and the theme system is nothing short of brilliant.

As you can tells no one platform is perfect, and each has its flaws. which blogging platform do you use and why?