Welcome to the second day of Blapril postings and with it comes a batch of new sign-ups to join in this process. I really should probably stop even jokingly referring to them as victims, because we really want this to be a joyful experience for all involved. At the time of writing this we are up to 38 members of this giant band of adventurers and I couldn’t be happier to share the journey. If you want to keep tabs on all of the new sign-ups I am intermittently updating the list that can be found on the Blaugust Media Kit page. I decided yesterday that this makes a lot more sense than trying to post a new list every single day.
Free as in Beer
Yesterday I talked at length about what I consider to be the most important step of creating a blog, which is figuring out what to call it. Today I am going to focus on carving out some real estate for you to hang out a shingle and start writing. Essentially you can divide your options into two clear camps, those that you are hosting yourself and those that you are having someone else host for you. Even that I guess is a little less than clear because technically if you rent server space and install your own site on it, you are technically getting someone else to host it. However for the sake of this discussion today I am going to focus on the options that are completely free and allow you to be writing within minutes of signing up.
WordPress
WordPress is effectively the 500 pound juggernaut in the blogging world. It is fast and easy to get signed up and comes with a pretty solid blog reader as well. If you manage multiple sites it also allows you to set up a scenario where you can manage and update all of them through a single interface. The negative however is that all of the freedom to be gained through using WordPress comes with the self hosted version which can be found at WordPress.org. WordPress.com is the turnkey solution that allows you to push all of the hassle onto someone else, but in order to get many of the features you might want it requires a paid plan. However in the free version you get a <yournamehere>.wordpress.com domain name and the ability to start posting instantly.
I’ve been a proponent of WordPress.com for years as a first blogging experience in part because you are going to out grow whatever first platform you start on. I personally started on Blogger and migrated to self hosted WordPress because I was limited in my ability to do the things I wanted to do. Knowing this the transition between WordPress.com to self hosting the software from WordPress.org is extremely smooth and there are lots of tools baked into the default software to ease this transition. I am a big fan of starting with the free version of WordPress because it is going to give you a lot of flexibility moving forward when you decide that your free site isn’t enough for your current tastes.
Blogger
Next up I introduce you to Blogger.com the blogging application hosted and maintained by Google. The nice bit about this tool is that if you are already a denizen of google, you can just pick up and start integrating with the various google tools immediately using an account you are already familiar logging into and is hopefully protected by two factor authentication. The negative for me at least is that it is hosted by Google and has essentially been in “maintenance mode” for years with the last features being added in 2017 and a bunch of things slowly deprecated and removed in 2019. The killer feature of this blogging platform is the way that it manages your blogroll, and this used to be even more killer when it integrated with Google Reader, which was unfortunately sunset in 2013 which was a dark time for the blogosphere.
The folks that love blogger really seem to love it, and like I said I started out my blogging life with a small blogger that will never see the light of day. What I found frustrating about it is that it seemed like I lacked the level of granular control that I personally wanted from a blogging experience. I think for others that is more of a positive because they ultimately place those design decisions in the hands of a limited selection of prebuilt themes and just get to the business of writing. My biggest concern is that Google loves to cancel its products, and I feel like they have been gunning for Blogger for quite some time originally trying to turn Google Plus into the new blogging platform. It has not happened but given that it does not seem that they are actively working on the platform, I am not sure that the future does not see this site closing down.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a strange platform but one that bears mentioning. It is among the most straightforward platforms for just getting in and writing about something and offers a lot of clean mobile options if you want to blog on the go. It is also an excellent platform if you want to do a picture blog or post your artwork, because it is very image forward in the way that people consume content. I personally find it a bit lacking when it comes to writing anything long form, and while I syndicate to the platform I think it does a generally horrible job at actually conveying my posts. I think Tumblr works best when you are wanting to use it like a Long form Instagram.
The main reason I bring it up however is its sheer simplicity and its wide adoption by a number of specific subcultures of the blogosphere (and fandom). Much of what was formerly the Live Journal community found its sea legs over on Tumblr, and if your voice is targeted towards one of those communities then you are going to find a lot of traction and support (as well as a fair amount of drama) on Tumblr. Other than just syndicating my blog with WordPress tools to Tumblr, the only time I really use it is to log in and look at interesting pictures. I use it mostly to look at comic art and other fandom art, and Ammo from AggroChat and the creator of most of the artwork you see adorning this blog has a great Tumblr. It is definitely an option worth exploring if your vision is extremely image heavy.
Medium
Based on my understanding, Medium was created by one of the twitter co-founders and started its life as a way of sharing a longer form post on the micro-blogging platform similar to TwitLonger but with more “bloggerly” sensibilities. What it has morphed into over the years is a pretty solid blogging platform that is more focused on sharing articles than sharing an entire website with the public. Its content aggregation platform is focused on the type of content being shared and less on the author, but this allows for more organic discovery of your posts so long as people are searching on one of the various things you have tagged on. You don’t so much have a “site” with its own name, but you do have the ability to link to your Author page and that then links to all of the posts you have written.
I include this as an option because it has a really good writing platform with a bunch of very nice features. The end result is a very pretty and legible article, but you have to accept that you have very little control over the look at feel of it. You can insert images, create headers and even create those little call out snippets to drive interest in the piece, but you won’t be able to change font and formatting or shift away from anything other than the stark black on white theme. If you just want to write however and want your ideas to percolate among other peers that you may or may not know about then this might be a platform for you. That said it is really hard to actually create a brand that is anything other than you as a person on a platform like medium.
Get in and Get Writing
I am sure as soon as I post this, folks will chime in about other options. I largely focused on what I consider to be the four easiest options for getting up and running and blogging this afternoon. All of the above have options for getting started in minutes, and if you are late starting with Blapril they can serve as a bit of a jumpstart into blogging. As I said before you are likely going to outgrow your very first attempt at blogging, and like talking about an escape clause yesterday, my personal choice is WordPress just for the flexibility and ease of migrating elsewhere. However all of the above can serve you nicely as you begin this journey.
I’d just like to say that, at least until they decide to close it down, Google’s lack of interest in updating Blogger is by far one of the biggest things it has goign for it. One of the banes of the internet is the insatiable desire of hosting platforms and services to constantly “upgrade” things that are already every bit as good as they need to be. It almost always causes howls of protest and thousands – or millions – of very annoyed customers.
I just wish Google would ignore YouTube the way they’ve been ignoring Blogger.