Burst Blog

You’ve rolled up your sleeves and you’re ready to start a blog. You’ve picked your topic — say, portraits made out of food — and you chose a blog name (FoodFace?) You’re ready to type away.

But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.

In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.

Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.

If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.

Wordpress

Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.

It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.

Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.

How To Choose?

Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.

My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).

Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)

If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).

If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Happy blogging…