Choosing Your Blog Software

Welcome to the second lesson of Blogging for Airlines series.
Today we’re going to discuss about finding the perfect choice of software platform for your blog.
A blogging software platform is the specialized content management system powering your blog. These software come as either pre-installed hosted third party services or user-installable self hosted software.

Hosted Services
A hosted blogging service is one where the service provider hosts the software, essentially your blog, on their servers and provides the service to you for free or a fee.
An overview of a few hosted blogging service providers are as follows.

1. Blogger Blogspot – Free. Fee required if using custom domain ( eg: blog.yourairline.com or yourairlineblog.com ). Does not support plugins. Lacks advanced features found in other blogging platforms. Has limitations on taxonomy and uploading features. Up to 1GB free image hosting available. Owned by Google.

2.Type Pad – Paid service. Has a free micro-blogging service. Design is customizable. Supports widgets. Has some degree of Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ). Used by some popular bloggers ( like Seth Godin ). Mobile blogging supported. Based on Movable Type hosted platform. Owned by Six Apart.

3. WordPress.com – Free. Fee required for using custom domain. Advanced taxonomy features. Supports widgets, with most social networking tools ( eg: Tweet Button ) available as soon as they are announced. Customizable design. Considered to be one of the best SEO blogging platforms. Free statistics. Free URL shortening and Twitter posting service. Free comment spam detection service. Up to 3GB of free storage with expansion available via paid upgrades. Mobile version of your site available free of charge. Mobile blogging supported with dedicated applications available for many popular smartphone OSes. Used by a number of popular blogs such as Dow Jones’ AllThingsD, NFL, and CNN’s Political Ticker . Owned by Automattic.

Pros

• Pre-hosted. Avoids the hassle of setting up your servers, databases, and other hosting requirements.
• Usually cheaper and reliable on hosting, unless you run a server of your own.

Cons

• Less features. Lacks advanced features found in self-hosted software.
• Less extendability. Lacks the ability to extend the software’s functionality through plugins.
• Less customisation. Lacks the ability to customize the design and other aesthetical elements to suit your main website’s design.


WordPress Edit Post Screen

Self Hosted
Self hosted blogging software can be hosted on your own server, and can have your own custom URL and a range of extendability options.
An overview of two of the most popular self hosted blogging software are as follows.

1. Movable Type – Has both free and paid versions. Supports multiple blogs, standalone pages, file management, templates, user roles and taxonomy features. Supports plugins. The software is written in Perl and needs a MySQL database to run. Support requires a paid subscription. Licensed under GPL v2. Open source. Used by popular blogs such as The Huffington Post and Boing Boing.

2. WordPress – Totally free. Supports advanced multiple blogs, standalone pages, custom post types, file management, user roles, advanced taxonomy, custom permalinks, advanced templating, widgets, plugins, themes, extensive CMS capabilities, considered to be the best SEO blogging software, coding filters, coding hooks, advanced styling, valid XHTML code. The world’s most popular blogging platform. Also the world’s most popular CMS platform. WordPress has the most advanced and rich plugin and theme architecture of all blogging software and provides infinite extendability opportunities, which extends to even running a fully integrated forum or social network inside WordPress itself. Supports a number of mobile versions and mobile administration interfaces. Supports the same WordPress.com mobile blogging applications. WordPress.com spam detection and statistics services are available to be used free of charge. Needs a MySQL database to run. Written in PHP thus running on almost any web server. Free support forums. Licensed under GPL v2. Open source. Used by the world’s most popular blogs such as Wired WebMonkey, CNN, GigaOm PRO, ChrisBrogan.com and even the popular social media guide Mashable . Owned by Automattic and community powered WordPress Foundation.

Pros

• A range of advanced features
• Advanced customization
• Extendability

Cons

• Higher costs needed for hosting unless your company already owns servers

Note: This higher cost is almost always offset by the extra features you receive. And this cost is almost always nil if you already have a ( shared/dedicated ) server where a website of yours is hosted.

As you can see from the above, WordPress emerges as the clear winner in both hosted and self-hosted categories. It is free, open source, community driven and has much advanced features and extensible than any other competing software. This website too, is powered by WordPress.
So, from now on this tutorial will focus on WordPress as the platform of choice, for the rest of the tutorial series.
Let’s meet from the next lesson and discuss how to take your blog to the next level.

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