A good time is BlogTime

There are a number of free Blogging platforms that you can use to publish your blog, two of the most popular are Google’s Blogger and WordPress which is an open source product.

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Blogger

blogger.com and blogspot.com are both operated by Google and are now effectively the same platform. Very easy to set up and use so for anyone new to blogging and perhaps looking to publish their first blog, this may be a great place for you to start. Only you know where you ultimately want to go with blogging so only you can decide if this is the right choice for you.

There is an option to post to your own domain or you can just publish on Googles free site, this means that whatever name you give your blog (as long as it is available, not always the case) it will be suffixed by .blogspot.com e.g. ‘http://www.urdomain.blogspot.com’.

You will need to register with Google to create an account but after that, if you use this option, life could not really be simpler for setting up and publishing your first blog.

WordPress

Probably more popular and considered to be the industry standard by many people is the WordPress blogging platform. Again there are 2 options, you can either use WordPress.com to configure and publish your blog on their free domain, there is less flexibility for configuring your blog with this option, or you can use WordPress.org to publish your blog to your own domain.

There are a number of advantages to publishing to your own registered domain, often it is considered to present a more professional image particularly if you are operating your blog as a business initiative, you are also much less limited as to the type of content you can include and the adverts you can place on your blog also the work and effort you put into your blog is for a product you own or own the rights to.

There are many web hosting sites that will allow you to download the WordPress format to your domain site via a CPanel interface and once downloaded you can select a theme and publish your blog. So although it can be a little daunting if you are not familiar with the process, it is actually relatively easy to do and much of the advice supplied in previous postings with respect to domain name selection and registration, plus hosting options stand true as much for blogging as it does for website hosting.

Two of the best and most affordable web hosts that provide this facility are:

I personally use Hostgator and have found it to be an excellent package, the starter package is $4.95 per month for a single domain.

So why is WordPress considered to be an industry standard by many, that’s a good question and reasonably easily answered.

• Large established support network and forum community
• Ability to drop a huge range of available plugins into your blog format
• You can choose from literally hundreds of different themes
• Loads of support documentation
• Access to WordPress code so that you can customise it to your own requirements, skill base dependent
• Very easy to install if you use the right hosting site with the relevant support features
• No forced advertisements
• It is an open source product

There are loads more reasons as well but these are the main ones and most important.

Joomla.com is a 3rd and very popular blog platform, but for your average Joe with no coding experience, it can be a bit tricky to set up. For that reason it is unlikely to be as popular as Blogger and WordPress, but for those who are capable it does provide a very flexible and capable format.

There are of course any number of social bookmarking sites that provide blogging options these include Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace,Facebook and Vox, these are all great for blogging for friends and family primarily although there are efforts from some of these guys to break into ecommerce markets.

Finally if you want to pay for your blogging experience you can take a look at Typepad or MovableType

For more information on the whole concept and process of blogging (in a WordPress format) visit A good time is BlogTime