Best Blog Platforms?

A lot of us are at tumblr.com. It was pretty easy to set up, and I’m a novice myself.

Blogger is super-easy, as it will also host your blog for free, and just works as part of your larger google account (if you already use Gmail or Google Calander, setting up a blogger account and starting your blog takes < 5 minutes).

Wordpress is fancier and gives you more options, but I don’t know much about how it needs to be hosted.

Livejournal is technically a blogging service, but is full of teen angst and should be avoided if one wishes to be taken seriously.

For a super-low-maintenance, super tiny blog, tumblr is a “microblogging” service that tries to keep things super-simple and super-easy. For example, Number One consists entirely of screenshots of Commander Riker from Star Trek TNG.

http://www.tumblr.com/ is pretty awesome if you are starting from scratch. It has tons of easy to install themes and you can change damn near everything. And the social part of tumblr is superb. It is easy to get a lot of people to follow you.

I had a blog I hosted with Wordpress and I have pretty much switched to Tumblr.

Does tumblr allow you to place ads on your blog and keep all the revenue? I know that Blogger lets you put Google Ads, but they take a percentage of your revenue.

Edit: I see that Blogger no longer takes a share of ad revenues.

You could. You can pretty much add whatever HTML, CSS, or Javascript you want.

Blogger is a Google owned thing. They have deep hooks into Blogger.

But really. There is a 99% chance you will never make any significant amount from ads on your blog.

I’ve actually had several ideas for some serious blogs with focused content… but who knows if they’ll make any money.

They could. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t quit your day job.

I would go with Blogger or Wordpress, if you’re looking for a traditional blogging format.

I have a tumblr, and it’s great, but it’s not the best tool for traditional blogging (in my opinion), because there are extra steps you have to take set it up for visitors – such as installing your own comments. A lot of people think of tumblr as a more sophisticated micro-blogging tool. I mostly use my tumblr to post pictures, music, and short blurbs, nothing in-depth. Most tumblrs I come across focus on the same thing.

So, basically, it’s all depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

My longest running blog is using Wordpress, hosted by Wordpress.

I would agree with @perplexism, I love my tumblr blog, but I just post pictures on it and absolutely nothing else. If you want to write real entries, I suggest wordpress or blogger. Personally I use blogger, and it has never let me down.

my browser (or one of them, anyway… I only used one) had trouble loading up Tumblr, anyway.

WordPress is the only way to go. You have two options: wordpress.org lets you download the software and run it on your own (this is what I do at www.tomslatin.com), or wordpress.com allows you to run it on their servers (more popular / cheaper option). Either way, I think it’s the best blogging platform that’s out today.

Wordpress is not the ONLY way to go but for a beginner its great, so is Blogger.

If you want a far more powerful and adaptable blog software that allows for multi users and multi blogs in the same install, check out www.b2evolution.net I don’t use all those features but it is so easy to use and customize even for a single user single blog.

I have four blogs and I’ve tried Wordpress on three of them, found it way to limited for my liking. The fact that it couldn’t handle the most basic task, posting several pics in a post, without blowing up my layout, drove me crazy. That surely has been fixed by now. I migrated everything to b2evo.

InsaneJournal is preferred by many fanfic writers (and artists) to LJ because it is very similar in layout and how it works, but IJ doesn’t believe in censoring things just because it offends a few people (the way LJ does).

So some of the more questionable fic, on LJ, could possibly be deleted/censored/burned at the stake, but that won’t happen on IJ.

IJ is, in my mind, the adult (as in grown-up) version of LJ, much in the same way that Fluther is the adult version of Yahoo Answers.