Go free or paid

French | Spanish | Portuguese | Italian | German | Japanese | Chinese | Korean | Russian | Arabic

The blogging applications that I cover with the notable exception of Blogger, require you to pay something to use them. With TypePad, for instance, service costs a few dollars per month for a basic account, although the upshot is that you get quite a bit for those dollars, including storage for images and multimedia files, as well as some very impressive features. With Blogger, you get the tool free and you can host it for free on BlogSpot. That said, Google’s approach to “free” is nice—as you’ll see, you can even get rid of the little BlogSpot toolbar on your site if you’d like to, and Google doesn’t mind. With the self-hosted tools, you may need to pay to register the software itself, but, regardless of whether it is commercial software or open source software that can be used freely, it’s still going to cost you something to host the software on a hosting account or on your own personal server computer. Paying for blogging service generally means that you’ll get a better tool, and more storage space online to add audio, photos, and perhaps even video. And, as I’ve mentioned, Blogger is a bit more limited than some of the other tools that are available, even if it is also elegant and fun to work with. Those hosted services that you pay a little money for tend to offer additional features and frequent updates to go along with the demand for a little money. As for commercial software versus open source software, it’s an interesting question. With commercial software, if you’ve paid the registration fee you should be assured of a reasonable amount of customer and technical service that goes along with the product. In the case of a tool such as ExpressionEngine, paying for it should mean regular updates, security patches, and add-ons that are designed to work well with the original product. (ExpressionEngine also offers a no-cost “core” version that offers the blogging functionality but few of the add-on modules such as the forums, wikis, or user management modules.) That said, the open source model tends to work well, particularly on popular projects such as WordPress.

With an open source blogging application, you have many, many different programmers who are building add-ons, testing the original, and often even criticizing the way the application is built and updated. Often, that means you get a very good core product that’s both secure and effective. It can also mean that individual plug-ins—as is sometimes the case with plugins designed for WordPress—are never fully finished. Perhaps someone gets tired of updating a module or something similar happens that results in some part of the functionality never materializing if only because the money motivation isn’t there. That can be true of commercial solutions as well, but a commercial solution in that sort of predicament might also be on its last legs as a viable product. In my experience, the further you get away from a project such as WordPress, which has many, many users and contributors, the more likely you are to run into dead-ends with open source software. Again, it depends on how active the community is that supports the software. In a nutshell, the best answer is that you can get some great stuff for free when it comes to blogging applications, but to go really deep with your blog, you’ll probably have to pay something, whether it’s paying for commercial licenses, hosting fees, third-party add-ons, or other services that you want to use on your blog. Fortunately, you probably won’t have to pay a lot to accomplish what you want to on your blog until you finally reach the point where you decide it’s time to hire a programmer (or become one) and build a better blog than anyone has yet seen! Here’s another thought: If you actively read a number of blogs and you happen to admire their design, take a quick inventory of the blogging tools that those blogs are using.

I went through my bookmarks quickly and noticed that a lot of the blogs I visit regularly use WordPress, a few use TypePad, a few use ExpressionEngine, and a handful use other solutions such as Scoop, Vox, and SquareSpace. Blogger has been around for a while, both in its pre-Google and Google-owned phases. Easily one of the most popular blogging services, especially for people getting started, Blogger represents a very easy way to get started with a diarystyle blog. In some ways it offers much less flexibility than any of the other tools discussed in this article, but, at the same time, the fact that it’s so popular means that you’ll find a lot of support for Blogger, a lot of third-party templates, and some fun plug-ins and widgets that you can use with Blogger to access different services. One thing that differentiates Blogger from some other tools is that it’s designed to help you publish a blog comprised of static HTML pages on the Web. Many blogging tools essentially re-create the blog every time a new person arrives at your website by consulting a database and then placing the entries in a template “on the fly.” Blogger doesn’t do that; instead, each time you add a new entry, Blogger re-writes the HTML documents for your site so that they’re updated with the changes. This can cause it to take a little longer for Blogger to update a site when you make a change, particularly if that site has many pages of archives. But it can also mean better loading times for your visitors—your blog pages may arrive in your visitor’s browser a bit quicker than with some other tools. Here are some other strengths that Blogger offers:

Integration with Many Third-Party Tools Because Blogger is the most popular option for blogging on the Web, many Windows, Macintosh, and Linux applications exist that allow you to update your blog from within the application. This is even true of other Google tools such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Support for Multiple Authors Blogger will support multiple authors for your blog, each of whom must have a Google log-in and be granted access to your log from with the administrative controls. Once you’ve done that, they’re ready to post.

On-screen Editing In the “new” Google-developed Blogger, you can edit entries and other elements of your blog simply by clicking small Quick Editing icons that appear when you’re logged into Blogger and you’re browsing the page. That can be a lot easier (and perhaps more fun) than digging into the behind-the-scenes templates and controls.

Integration with Google Adsense Anyone can add Google text advertising to their blogs, but Blogger has controls for it—including access to statistics and other fun stuff—from within the Blogger interface.

Visual Template Editing The latest version of Blogger enables you to edit your blog’s template without digging into special commands or HTML codes. You can simply drag and drop to add new “widgets” to your page. Of course, if you want to you can still dig into the code.

If there’s a weakness to Blogger it’s that the application itself lacks much modularity in terms of enabling you to add high-end user management features, a forum, wiki, or a great deal of the customization options that other blogging tools offer. Likewise, some of the more sophisticated blogging tools offer support for multiple blogs, or for merging different blogs into “portals” of information and so on. (That’s not to say you can’t use Blogger with other web tools installed on a hosting account; you certainly can. It’s just that some blogging solutions integrate more of those tools into the same package.) That said, since you can edit the HTML of your template, you can take advantage of all sorts of Web 2.0 options that are discussed in other articles. And, Blogger can post your blog to your own hosting account, so it can sit side-by-side with any serve-it-yourself tools you decide to add later. And the fact that Blogger generates standard HTML pages can be handy, as it causes less of a load on your hosting account’s server computers. So, if your goal is easy blogging with just you or a few authors, you don’t mind having your entire blog entry appear on the main page of your blog and you like the flexibility of posting to BlogSpot or to your own Web hosting account. Blogger is a great way to get started blogging.