Posts tagged blogging

Quick overview of available Blogging Platforms

4 years ago

by Benedict Herold in blogging

Blogging has become a passion to lot of people these days (I can include myself). Technorati says a new blog appears every 2 seconds. And there are lot many novice blogger behind it. They will come across this question before they start a blog “which blogging platform to use?”

The options are wide open and choice is yours!

This article might not answer the question directly. However, I’d try to provide least information about most of blogging platforms that are available today either as a service or download.

WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the best and well-known open source Blogging platform. It is widely used commonly by popular self-hosted blogs around the blogosphere. It runs with minimal setup and it requires just PHP/ MySQL preferably in Apache. It rates high compared with other since it can be highly customized. In addition to this there are huge number of plugin authors and theme authors are there to help reduce bloggers effort. WordPress.org also has nice development community that ensures the WordPress core get better and better.

Blogger
Blogger is a free one-push blog publishing platform. Most of the novice bloggers starts Blogging with Google’s Blogger in first place. The new blogger comes in with Widget support that eradicated the use of HTML for templates. Setting up a blog in Blogger is painless and easiest of anything else. You can customize Blogger to certain extend only since they are not an open source solution. There are few popular blogs that still runs on Blogger.

WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a multi-user version variant of WordPress.org. WordPress.com have their own-hosted solution of newbie bloggers, who doesn’t have a hosting space. WordPress.com comes in with neat option for a newbie. WordPress.com comes with space restrictions; in addition to that you can monetize your blog.

Movable Type
Movable Type is a web blog publishing platform successfully developed by SixApart. It is the one who invented Trackback feature in the first hand that was later devised by other blogging systems as well and now it is more-or-less a standard. Movable Type is written in Perl and supports most of the Database as backend. Movable Type is best suited for business use.

Typepad
Typepad is a blogging service provided by SixApart and it is one of largest paid blogging service available now. Typepad is based on Movable Type and it shares most of its technical functions. Additionally, it also supports multi-user, mobile and photo blogging. Typepad is been successfully used by lot of professional writers.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a CMS that allows you to express your self by publishing your private journal, your blog or your forum or any of a social entity. It is the best in town for writing life journals.

Vox
Vox is a personal blogging service. It’s all about ease of use, privacy control, playing well with other web services, and staying connected to the people you care about. Vox is good platform when it comes to multimedia blogging.

Text Pattern
Text Patter is a flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites. Blogs works fine as well. Text Pattern also has its own list of plugins and templates.

Drupal
Drupal is a modular content management system and the blogging engine was initially indented for bulletin board system. Drupal is good for building online communities and those communities powers their blogging engine. It is written in PHP. It has a wide community support.

Joomla
Joomla is truly a content management system that forked from Mambo, a pretty good open source content management system. Joomla has won the best open source content management system of the year 2006. Joomla has a decent blogging engine and other extension.

Expression Engine
pMachine’s Expression Engine is not well know but it is a powerful and much extensible software that you may need to give a try. It is a complete content management system with much Blogging feature as well. In addition to Blogging module it comes with inbuilt gallery module. It is more suitable for heavy business blogs. Also the cost associated with it is high.

Nucleus
Nucleus is been around for sometime now and it is not much popular yet though. Nucleus is mature blogging software that comes with most of the required blogging features. Nucleus is also programmed in PHP and runs on MySQL backend.

b2evolution
b2evloution was developed from the same original code that spawned WordPress, b2Evolution is written in PHP and licensed under GPL so is always free to use. It comes with lot of features that you may need to check, which includes antispam, skins, multi-blogs, users, authors, integrated stats, its own plugin framework etc. etc.

TeraPad
TeraPad is hosted blogging solution which takes blogger beyond the blogging experience. TeraPad comes in with versatile blogging tools, image gallery, PayPal ready shopping cart, event calendar etc. TeraPad places a its ad over the site which might annoy bloggers a little but may it is need for TeraPad to keep it service Free

This is not a comprehensive list, I might have left out few of them with or without my knowledge. You can very well indicate them by your comments.

Update (06/17) : Mayank has pointed out two more additional blogging service. I have added an overview of TeraPad; Thanks Mayank.

Windows Live Writer, a blog publishing tool

5 years ago

by Benedict Herold in tools

Windows Live Writer is a new off-line WYSIWYG blog publishing system by Microsoft

Microsoft launched Windows Live Writer, a blog publishing tool few days back. After reading couple of reviews about this tool, I made my mind to take a chance to try out the windows app, which is freely downloadable from Microsoft site. This windows application allows you to blog directly to your site without a web interface. At the first site it resembles to FrontPage, a web publishing software from Microsoft. Windows Live Writer with integrated WYSIWYG editor will be useful for blog authors who like do thing pretty fast.

Windows Live Writer has a lot of bells and whistles – preview in WYSIWYG or HTML mode, support for most blogging platforms (Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress and others), easy insertion of photos and things like Live.com Maps, and tagging. What’s nice about Windows Live Writer is that it reads your current blog’s template and it lets you preview your content while creating it. It’s like seeing your blog post growing.

The rich-text editor is not impressing, as it contains the usual elements and doesn’t produce clean code (you’ll notice many unneeded tags). When you insert pictures, you’ve got more options: you can resize the picture, add a nice shadow, adjust brightness and even use some simple effects like sepia. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn’t allow you to publish images for the hosted blogs

Windows Live Writer is available only for windows and more over it’s still beta. The simple interface and the innovative additions make this tool a good replacement for the standard blogging interfaces and it’s a good alternative to Performancing for Firefox, Qumana, but it’s still far from a commercial application like ecto.

Windows Live Writer needs lot of improvements with features like categories, tags, etc., should show up. Moreover the formatting code should be clean.

For more information about the tool read the writer team blog at http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

blogging editor live microsoft windows

Tips to increase blog traffic

5 years ago

by Benedict Herold in seo

“Write what your readers would like to read”.

– a mantra all bloggers should follow

Hmm.. it’s very very true. If you like to write something don’t write just for your shake make that readers like to read it too!! But how do you know what a reader likes to read? Besides different people have different tastes. What I have to say is that- whatever content you write, pay attention to your writing style.

Here are some more tips on increasing your blog traffic by improving your style on writing contents:

Use Attractive Titles
Using attractive titles is one way of getting readers to visit your blog from Search Engines and Feeds. Also, use keywords in your title that relate to the post. Use attractive title and description while you submit to blog directories.

Use numbers / buzzwords in your title. Using titles like ‘10 best pratices’, ’100 ways to’, ‘Top 5′, etc can help you to grab readers attention and visit your blog.
Be Unique
Readers come to your blog to read something different. They will not come just to read what they have read on other blogs. Making your blog stand out from other blogs both in content and design is important if you want to have repeat visitors.
Link to the source
If you post about some interesting news that you just read on your favorite News site, link to it (the source). Chances are there for readers from that news blog will visit your blog from the pingback on the site. Also, it helps make your content look informative.
Write your content using lists
I’ve seen blogs that make up to the top place will use lists for this contents. Use appropriate list, ordered (numbered) or unordered (bullet) list dependingp upon the content structure. Using lists can make your post both visually appealing and interesting to read. It helps readers who are just scanning your text to see if your posts fits what they are looking for. The content must not bescattered; it should be in well organized and managed manner.
Write Tutorials
Write handy tutorials that will make your readers walk through a process that teaches them how to achieve a goal. Tutorials have more chance of getting bookmarked in Bookmarking sites or other blogs which will get you plenty of readers and links. Write down unique tutorial which are more specific which will get you top position in the search engine results.
Don’t change your blogs topic
Once you choose what you blog about on your blog, don’t change it. Your readers come to read posts on that topic. Writing posts on a different topic will not look good for your blog. And if done thfrustratedusturate the reader.
Write on Technological stuff
Write more about latest technological happening. Most of the readers are tech savy. Also chance of hits from search engine is high.
Link to your older posts
Don’t expect your readers to have been reading your posts from the time you started your blog. So next time, when you write about things you have written previously, link to them.