You know you want to blog, but with what?

Thanks to an indirect referral, I heard about Christina Warren who was lucky enough to attend SXSW (I wasn’t able to go so I’m jealous), but through a friend of a friend, I came across her Twitter name and found out she has a website/blog…well several in fact. So I was scouring through her blog postings and this was one rather informative. Not that it delved too deeply into the whole social media or interactive development area, but it focuses on helping those of us who battle constantly with figuring out just HOW to set up our own blog and offers a pretty straight-forward comparison on the major platforms: WordPress, Moveable Type, LiveJournal, and a couple more.

I’ve actually gone through circles trying to figure out what to do with this blog when I first started about 2 years ago. Of course I’ve dabbled in setting up several blogs, from Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, and even creating my own basic “down and dirty” static blog sans comments – yes, I know that somewhat defeats the purpose and meaning of Social Media…get over it! So when I started this blog on TheLetterTwo.com, I initially started with Blogger (which I believe that was one of the platforms that Christina did not include in her blog). Blogger, as you know, is a Google blog platform and you can use it to run your blog, regardless of whether you have it hosted on your own server or on Google’s monsterous servers. But eventually I switched because of the poor quality and service that I received from Blogger. Luckily, I came around and decided to go with WordPress.com because of viral marketing – a very good friend who is also a blogger, told me that there was more customization and support offered with WordPress and so I’ve tried it out and like it so much that I’ve went ahead and installed it for another one of my blogs.

I agree with Christina that the one con with WordPress is that you have to basically install new updates every other week or something like that. There are so many patches and updates that you think you’re using a company owned by Microsoft or something like that. But I guess I rather enjoy WordPress and won’t go back to Blogger. I used them to blog and ran it through my domain, but there were constant problems in getting my postings uploaded and even just to add new blogs to your roll, you’d have to learn HTML! Where’s the usability and accessibility? There is none…so now I’m happy with WordPress. I’m sure that all the other ones are great to use, but for now, this is my story and I’m sticking to it.

I highly recommend you read this blog post by Christina Warren, especially if you’re trying to start a blog for yourself and don’t know where to begin.