Bloggism.net has a two part article series with reviews and feature lists of the most popular free blogging tools. In part one, WordPress gets the best review (yeah!), and Movable Type, Drupal, Greymatter, b2evolution, and Geeklog are also covered in part two.
A blogger just like any other professional needs gear, surprisingly a lot more than conventional writers. When budget is tight and you want to create your unique blog, certainly free blog software is the options. But there are so many of them now days. Its sure pain in the butt to find flexible yet user friendly software for blog, out of so many. Needs lots of time, research and testing to come up with the best that fits your needs, I know since I had to spend a long time choosing my own blog software. I will just divide this discussion into two segments for better quality and flexibility. Since I can’t cover discussion all the software, I will just go with most popular and promising blog software.
WordPress: I will start with this one not because my personal blog site is built on it, but because in my analysis the best free software so far for blogger. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Seriously flexible yet can be turned into a super resourceful platform, off course some tweaking required for that. Well documentation, extended support and developer network makes it more than you can expect from free software. Truly open source software and have a large community of developer constantly producing add-ons, themes, plug-ins etc. which make it a ready-mate yet flexible blog platform ever.
If you really want to feel the “WordPress Love”, check out Crocodile Caucus: Six Things I Love About WordPress. Makes you feel all warm and soft inside, doesn’t it? So where is your list of things you love about WordPress, huh?
I have a list of other blogging tools and reviews in my blog anniversary reviews on “Blogging Tools Analysis and Reviews” if you are shopping for blogging software programs.
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
12 Comments
I love WordPress as much as you do i guess. But these days there is one more thing which is sharing the love for WP, The Live Writer. I’m having a great time with it. A few plugings for communicating between WP and live writer would make it perfect toy for a blogger.
WordPress is a great tool! My blogs have done so much better and have been much easier to maintain since I switched them to WordPress.
I started with WordPress and never needed to look at any other CMS.
I’m also a huge fan of wordpress and it’s the first tool I recommend folks to try out if they want to start blogging. In addition, I’ve also sent readers to selected articles on your own site on how to use wordpress! Great site and a great resource to the wordpress community!
Hey Greymatter! I actually know the guy that started that thing. I had totally forgotten about it 🙂
I can’t visualize myself using other than WordPress.
One does gotta enjoy the simplicity and easy template system of WordPress. But, in the end, Expression Engine wins my love.
Nothing can beat wordpress.. truly amazing tool..
added with few plugins and a perfect theme nothing can beat it in the block
I have a blog on Vox (http://gingercampbell.vox.com) which is really easy to use, but I am interested in starting to podcast so I am looking for a more flexible tool. I just found this blog and I am wondering if one can host a low-volume podcast off a free WordPress blog. I have no objection to paying for webhosting, but I am a little intimidated about trying to install WordPress on my own. My current homepage is on .Mac and I am not sure if it supports WordPress.
I know the answers to these newbie questions are buried somewhere in the WordPress website, but I would appreciate if someone could steer me to the proper links or offer comments.
I’ve used Blogger, Textpattern and I tried the new Vox, but until now, WordPress is by far the most comfortable system. I realy like the ease there is, but I dislike some of its HTML-functionality (did you ever try to put the html of youtube into the html-window – it does not work!). Still, WordPress is the best one out there!
WordPress is way more ahead then anyone. The time i wrote that article, and now it changed and updated a lot more. Just three reason should be enough(Apart from free) to choose it-
1. Flexibility (You can make it not only look like what you want but also work like how you want).
2. Up to date (Constant upgrade to keep up with the technological advancement-No other platform/CMS i found do that).
3. Help (Great volume of easy to understand documentation, huge forum support and numerous geek across the net to answer your questions. Have you seen any other like this? )
Thanks Lorelle for mentioning my small effort.
Blogger is great. WordPress is great. Textpattern is great, too. What I love with WordPress is its simplicty in creating complex things like pages, categories, etc. Where in all the other programs this is much more difficult, it is just a click away here.
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[…] Lorelle VanFossen writes on Blogging Gear: Start With a Good Blogging Program. He points to several articles and reviews on blogging programs (well worth a read if you’re serious about what you do). In the post he asks: So where is your list of things you love about WordPress, huh? […]