As discussed in my post regarding passive incomes over the Internet, one of the most popular platforms for publishing your informational content is blogging. Blogs are on-line journals or diaries of a topic of your choice. By default, blog posts are organized in the chronicle order upon their publication. They can also be grouped in categories or tagged for easier navigation or look-up.
Today, there are many hosted blog services that free you from hosting your own and form the communities with millions of bloggers. Among the popular ones are Blogger, WordPress, Yahoo! 360, Windows Live Spaces, and TypePad. Alternatively, you can post your blog entries at e-publishing sites like HubPages and Squidoo. Squidoo also provides its lensmasters a blog service, called SquidTop, via WorkPress. It's worth noticing that WordPress can also be downloaded and hosted by your own. Movable Type - an open source organization that brings blogs, web sites, and social networks under one software does not offer the hosting service.
To make it easier for you to find the home for your blogs, I have compared Blogger and WordPress feature-by-feature in the table below. While browsing through the table, you should start considering which features are critical for your blogs. For me, the primary factors are the following:
- Fees: I think you would agree with me on opting for blog services that are free of charge with a reasonable sets of functionality and storage space. It is particularly important, when my adventure is still at the exploration phase. Consider a brand-name service from Blogger run by Google, Windows Live Spaces from Microsoft, and a few others, so your precious work wouldn't be lost due to malpractices or abrupt business turmoils.
- Multiple blogs: Although your blog can cover all interesting subjects, I recommend that you create separate blogs for different topics. Not only would the separation improve the rankings of your posts in search results, but also help make searching engine advertising more efficient. By being focused, your blogs offer more relevant posts to your readers. In return, you'll find a better targeted group of readers. As such, the capability to have all my blogs (e.g. Project BKO and Fishtarian) under one user account makes my jobs much easier.
- Customization or extension: Most of the blog services provide a rich set of features without any special customization or coding. It is, however, important to keep customization or extension as an option. The blog service should have public APIs available for developers to add new widgets or plug-ins. When necessary, I may need to customize the template or implement certain features (e.g. supporting excerpts).
- Advertising: Internet advertising is a key element of the Internet business. Although not a primary reason, generating passive incomes is always a welcome gift.
- Team contribution: This feature is important so that my kids can contribute to my blogs. It would become handy, when I later recruit some partners to join my adventure.
- Openness: It is also important that I am able to move my posts to other blog services via export and import utilities and not get stuck with a service. You may want to perform your own backups occasionally.
Table 1: Comparing Blogger and WordPress
| Features | Blogger | WordPress |
| Fees | Free. | Free WordPress.com blogs come with 3GB of space for storing uploaded files and images. Pay fees for very advanced features or more upload space. |
| Setup | Hosted. | Hosted or download the software and host your own blog. |
| # of blogs per user | Unlimited. This is very useful, if you plan to blogs on various topics. | Unlimited. |
| # of pages per blog | Only the home and the post pages. | Can create additional pages to the home and post pages. Pages are not meant for displaying posts (although possible via plug-ins) but to display static content (e.g. About, Copyrights, Policies) that is less time-sensitive like posts. |
| User name | Display name can be different from the email you use to login and can be changed later. You can also choose to show your real name. | Display name is the login user name and can not be changed. |
| Import | Import from AOL only or a Blogger XML file. | Support Blogger, Moveable Type, TypePad blogs, WordPress export file, or LiveJournal XML. |
| Export | Export to a Blogger XML file. | Export file in WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR format can be downloaded and saved as a backup. |
| Page design | Support additional page elements in header, body, side-bar, and footer areas. drag-and-drop positioning. | Spport additional widgets only in side-bar. |
| Themes | Choose from about a dozen of templates; preview with the pre-loaded image. Template CSS and HTML can be customized. | Choose from over 70 templates with a two- or three-column layout. Excellent preview with the real post content and the click-able links. Template CSS can be modified. |
| Post editor | Support rich text and HTML editing. Tables are supported by editing the HTML. Remove all line breaks between <table> and </table>. | Support rich text and HTML editing with support for excerpt, categories, and tags in the same editor page. Better support for audio, video, and polls. Tables are supported by HTML editing. |
| Post categorization | Assign tags to the post. Posts can be grouped and viewed by tags. | Assign categories and tags to the post. Posts can be grouped and viewed by categories or tags. Categories and tags are very similar and sometimes confusing. Categories generally don't change often, while tags usually change more dynamically with every post and can be shown in the "tag cloud". |
| Permalink | Automatically generated; can not be changed. | Automatically generated; can be changed. |
| Comments | Support anonymous comments and moderation. | Support anonymous comments and moderation. |
| Linkbacks to keep track other sites that have links to the posts. | Support backlinks. | Support trackbacks and pingbacks. |
| Advertising | Ads are allowed. AdSense ads are natively supported. | For performance reason, Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds, sponsored/paid posts including PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Smorty; affiliate/referral links to the following domains: usercash, clickbank, clickhop, cashrocks, payingcash; clicktrackers and any promotion of the “I made a million on the internet and so can you” type of advertising are not permitted to be added by users, unless you're one of those VIP blogs. AdSense ads may be added by WordPress, but can be avoided with a fee. |
| Custom domain | Supported. | Supported. |
| Traffic analysis | Supported via Google Analytics. | Supported navtively via Blog Stats. |
| Team blogging | Grant users admin or author roles. | Grant users admin, author, contributor, and editor roles. |
Also, read this post at eHow and HubPages.
No comments:
Post a Comment