OT: Blog

In message , Sunny writes

I like Blogger.com. It's free, but so are many of them. I find blogger has a good balance of ease-of-use and features. Some hosts e.g. Livejournal are easy to use but don't offer the features I want (e.g. ease of including pictures - crucial I would imagine for a blogging quilter). Others e.g. Typepad have gazillions of features but you have to be a bit of a geek to understand how to use it properly. The clincher for me was that blogger has no limit on picture uploads. You can have all the pics you want and it will never "cut you off".

If you want any help on getting set up with blogger, email me. But chances are you can do it without any help, it really is that easy.

Whatever you choose, let us know when you start so we can all see what you post, and leave encouraging comments.

Mel is right it depends on what you want it to do and your level of expertise.

I use livejournal and their scrapbook but i purchased a permanent account with them so that i would have all the features I wanted and I like that I can choose the people that can see my entries or leave them open to the public. I like the LJ scrapbook for my images because I can set them to public viewing but disallow copying of the images. On the other hand, most of my craft related posts are on my personal website and I haven't set up an actual blog application there.

~gyrl~

You've gotten good advice so far.

I use blogger for my personal blog and my research blog, but I don't post pictures on it.

I use powerblogs.com for my professional blog, but it is a pay site. It charges me yearly for bandwidth and server space. $15 a year ain't bad in my view.

I have too many blogs, really, because I don't post enough to any of them.

-georg

I've used two hosts: blogger and typepad. Pros and cons for each.

Blogger is free. That's a big plus in my book. It's easy to use, the service seems pretty good. I've had a few outages where my blog wasn't accessible, but I've had that on Typepad, too. There are some premade templates, and for the most part you just type your post and post it. You can access blogger at

Typepad costs more ($5 a month, IIRC, for the basic service), but it has more features. I went with it for my personal blog (see link in my siggy) because I liked how easy it was to post lists of things like blogs I read, books I'm reading, etc; I liked that I could categorize my posts; and I liked that I could add technorati tags. It also has built in tracking of where your hits are coming from, if that's of interest. (Although I'm using sitemeter on my work blog. It's free and has a LOT more information, which I need for the work blog.) Supposedly you can post pictures from a mobile phone onto typepad, but I've yet to do that successfully (probably my fault.) Typepad has a free 30 day trial. You can get details at

For me, 99.9% of what keeps me coming back to a blog is content, not the host. (YMMV.)

In message , Kathy Applebaum writes

Oh agreed without doubt, but 50% of what keeps me blogging is that it's easy to do so. If it were a fag I would give up sooner or later, so it's worth asking the question for a prospective new blogster.

Sorry I didn't make myself clear! I agree with you 100%, but I've also seen new bloggers get too hung up in which host is "best". The best one is the one a blogger will keep using. :)

I'd definitely recommend giving any service a tryout before committing. What's easy for me might not be easy for someone else, and vice versa.

Thanks! Youve all given good information and lots to "chew" on. I'm not jumping into the blogger waters just yet, gotta get organized. But I am going to do it sooner or later. My husband even wants me to do one. I did a lot of public speaking in my former life. I really don't have any kind of job or whatever now that would lead anyone to inv ite me to do that anymore. (Medical retirement bites the big one!) But I think I can incorporate some of those skills, plus my writing skills such as are left intact by my illness, into a blog. We shall see :) .

Thanks again, and I'll keep you posted.

Sunny