where i can get a free reliable public blog.

[Shlomi Fish]

On Tuesday 03 Nov 2009 11:39:29 Erez D wrote:
> hi
> 
> i want to create a new linux/oss related blog (in english)
> 
> any suggestions of where ?
> 

As usual, you have many options:

1. I host a personal blog ( http://shlomif.livejournal.com/ ) and several more 
specialised blogs ( http://community.livejournal.com/shlomif_tech/ , 
http://community.livejournal.com/shlomif_hsite/ ) on LiveJournal. I'm not 
paying for them, and I'm mostly happy with the feature set (there are nested 
comments, previews, edit-post-afterwards, and most other stuff) though a lot 
of stuff is missing (Digg/Reddit links, a share this button, more choice of 
skins/themes, etc.).

It's possible you can get LiveJournal.com to use a domain hosted on your place 
(like blog.erez.tld) but I didn't look into it.

2. http://wordpress.com/ is a hosted WordPress solution that has become 
popular. It allows you to set up a URL on your own domain and also provides a 
full XML dump of all the data (to prevent vendor lock-in). However, many 
important WordPress plugins (such as preview for comments) are missing even in 
the premium, paid, package).

3. There's also http://www.blogger.com/ , which is nice, but may have a lot of 
vendor lock-in, but it lets you host the blog on your own domain. It has some 
very complex language for customising the template.

It also restricts you to Google AdSense only, as being owned by Google.
This is a problem for me as my Google AdSense account got suspended:

http://community.livejournal.com/shlomif_hsite/11327.html

Google has a near-monopoly on web-based ads and they provide horrible support 
there, despite the fact that it is their main source of income.

4. You can always host your blog on your own domain. There are many blog 
engines:

* http://wordpress.org/ - seems to be the king of the hill, but is incredibly 
insecure, requires many plugins to get to a mostly usable state, and very 
buggy. (It ate at least two of my comments already, and the administrators 
could not know how to approve them, and I could not post them again, because 
they were too similar).

* http://www.movabletype.org/ - written in Perl and should be much better 
internally than WordPress. It has a weirdo plain-HTML caching system, though, 
that I don't like. You probably need mod_perl or Fast-CGI for that if you're 
going to handle a good load, so the el-cheapo hosting packages won't work. 

It has this fork: http://openmelody.org/ , which might be better, though it is 
currently "under development".

* There's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typo_%28software%29 , which is written 
in Ruby-on-Rails.

* You can use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal as a glorified blog engine, 
but I found it lacking.

* There are many others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog_software

-----------

I'd like to move my blogs to something I host on my servers, but have yet to 
find a good engine for that. I think I may take a closer look on Melody. 
Altreus and I started writing something on our own, but it has stalled:

http://www.ohloh.net/p/catable

5. It's not hard to find other hosted blogs. Some people keep a blog as a 
series of static HTML pages on their sites and then use a JavaScript-based 
commenting mechanism such as http://disqus.com/overview/ .

------------

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Rethinking CPAN - http://shlom.in/rethinking-cpan

Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.