Best Blogging Software
 by: Miles Evans

The blogging platform wars are getting really interesting and much of the discussion I find myself in lately revolves around what is happening with various CMS systems. The market can essentially be defined into 3 major camps: remotely hosted, self hosted, and community based systems. I have used pretty much every blogging platform available and each of them has its ups and downs. In this article I will cover the best options for each area taking into account price, usability, market share and of course SEO potential.

All of these products are either open source, completely free or have a functional free version.

Remotely Hosted Blogging Software

(Note: I cannot really recommend any of these from an SEO stand point as optimizing a domain you do not own or control is obviously not a good marketing plan.)

Blogger

Blogger is completely free and currently owns the majority of the remotely hosted user base, but not by a land slide . Bought out by Google in 1999, Blogger essentially fired up the blogging trend we see today. It is by far the easiest overall solution to use and if you are a novice user looking to throw up some recipes or poetry, this is for you. Blogger is completely free and includes some great features like comments, photo blogging, and a basic community feel with user profiles. Because it is so dumbed down there are some features you may not find with Blogger that are only available through 3rd party add-ons. As a side note Blogger weblogs do quite well in the search engines and this was recently exploited with it being the first choice for spam blogs or splogs. A splog is a weblog used for the sole purpose of gaining inbound links or generating thousands of keyword stuffed pages with Adsense and the like. The recent Google Jagger update cleared a large portion of this up. Free.

Typepad

Released in 2003 Typepad is a product of Sixapart, the makers of Movable Type. it is largely based on MT but there are some major enhancements and differences. Your blog can accomodate one or more photo albums with auto thumbnail generation. You can easily add music, books, and other media to Typelists, which grab a thumbnail from Amazon and other retailers for easily displaying in your sidebar. Typepad is also a great deal more technical than Blogger so a bit of HTML know how is recommended. On that note editing your blog to look the way you want it also quite easy and Typepad blogs are known for being very eye pleasing, intuitive and easy to navigate. In Sixapart’s business model Typepad is aimed at regular home and small business users while Movable Type is targeted at larger businesses or for internal intranets. Price: Basic, $4.95 a month; premium, $8.95 to $14.95 a month.

Xanga

These guys originated back in 1999 as a site for sharing book, music and movie reviews. Although it quickly morphed into a full blown blogging tool Xanga still maintains the ability to run a powerful review site. Xanga pulls data from several retailers like Amazon.com including thumbnails, pricing and a cover. The software also is very usable by novices with a powerful WYSIWYG editor allowing for easy HTML editing, adding smilies, links, and other symbols. By using Blog rings it is also easy to interface with Xanga’s other 3 million users to share interests, ideas, and of course traffic. Xanga comes in a free and $25 flavor.

Mentions: Blogsome, Blogster, MindSay, Multiply,

Self Hosted Blogging Software

WordPress

WordPress originally began as a mod of an older open source package known as B2. WP is MT’s biggest competition and is often the bain of endless Wordpress vs Movabletype style threads around the internet. Although launched just over a year or so ago WP has really taken the blogosphere by storm. And with good reason – Wordpress is completely free under GNU licensing and is packed with many featured you will not find anywhere else. It is also much easier to install and get blogging for novice users and has a very large and helpful community. WP runs on PHP/mySQL and is quite scalable judging from some of the very large and trafficked sites I see using it. It also sports utilities to import files from Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Wordpress recently upped the ante when Yahoo recently included them on their hosting packages, in addition to MT. I have to admit I am finding myself more and more digging WP and will likely convert Profitpapers to WP as I get time (it can be a biznitch). Wordpress is free.

Movable Type

Aside from maybe Greymatter (the original open source blogging tool), Movabletype dominated the blogging market share in 2002-2004. Released in late 2001, Perl based Movable Type by Sixapart has maintained a large portion of the blogging market share, due mainly to the fact that there is a free version (supporting up to 3 weblogs) and that it is incredibly powerful, intuitive and easy to customize. Template driven Movable Type also sports one of the largest communities of developers and blogging enthusiasts around, meaning lots of support, idea sharing, and of course plugins. Movable Type can be configured to dynamically generate HTML, PHP or any other kind of pages you like, meaning it is incredibly scalable, fast, and loved by spiders. It is perhaps the most well known blogging software for SEO purposes and it what currently powers Profitpapers and several of my other projects. Moveabletype is either Free with 3 authors, 1 weblog, and no support or $69.95 with unlimited weblogs, authors and full support.

Textpattern

Textpattern is the brainchild of Dean Allen and was written to ease publishing of content for those not inclined to learn HTML. Like WP and MT Textpattern runs on PHP and mySQL for easy administration, backups, and power. What really sets textpattern apart from the others is the integration of Textile. Textile is a tool for easily formatting content for those who do not know HTML. WP & MT have modules for textile as well but it is native to the Textpattern system. Another bonus of the app is its superior handling of comment spam due to its smaller market share. On a blogs I maintain running WP and MT I often find myself clearing out spam every day, whereas on some very busy textpattern sites I receive only manual comment spam (not bot driven). TP is open source.

Mentions: Blosxom, LifeType, Serendipity.

Community based Blogging Software

Slash

Waaaaay back in 1997, Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda launched a website known as Chips & Dips, supplied via his student account at Hope College in Michigan. In 1999 Andover.net acquired Slashdot. Shortly after, the underlying code was released as open source software called Slash. Like Movable Type and Greymatter, Slash runs on Perl, but it also has established hooks into MySQL and a very strong track record of scaling to enormous traffic levels. To give you an idea, the term ’slashdotted’ originated from acquiring a link on this now infamous and very popular tech news website – and consequently watching your servers melt. If you have never messed around with Slash, you really should as it is quite a powerful platform. Slash is open source.

Scoop

Another well known Perl based community blogging software is Scoop. Scoop is the software that powers Kuro5shin, DailyKos and many other busy community weblogs. Scoop took the Slashdot idea and expanded on it, making the discussion rather than the news the focus of the application. Where Slashdot entries tend to have a link with added commentary pointing readers off the site, Scoop points to stories written by members of the community keeping the reader within your own weblog. Scoop is also well known for handling large volumes of traffic and a large very technical community. Scoop is free .

Drupal

Drupal is a well known open source community blogging platform with a very large community of users and developers. Not only is Drupal free but it is damn powerful. Instead of Perl, which is quite hard to decode at times, even if you are a fluent coder, Drupal uses a PHP/mySQL platform. Drupal is also a very community focused application with a built in forum, download area, and hundreds of other home brewed mods and hacks. If you are looking for a lot of functionality give Drupal a check – the project has become quite mature. It is also much easier to use and customize than either Scoop or Slash. Drupal is also another open source project.

Mentions: LiveJournal, PHP Nuke.

About The Author

Miles Evans writes for www.ProfitPapers.com where he writes essays on organic SEO, SEM, development and other equally fascinating subjects.

profitpapers@gmail.com

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It is never too hard to download music online nowadays especially when there are tons of websites such as P2P networks that give them to you for free. In fact, these free networks even provide the software needed for you to download music online and share with others. It can be hard to reject their offers when everything seems to be “free”.

Did you know that the RIAA are taking some big time online music sharing individuals to task? Basically, these guys have been downloading free music from P2P sites and sharing them in a big way with thousands of others. If you are one of those, you need to be extra careful. At one point of time, it could probably be worthwhile to ponder if spending a couple of bucks to download music online at legal sources is something that can give you a peace of mind.

P2P music sites can provide free file sharing and downloading software. It allows you to download music online for free and this is very often the culprit behind problems like infecting your computers with viruses and malware.

File sharing software has been known for a while now to tag each music file you download with an adware. Adware may not be a virus but when your computer gets clustered with many of these, they would tax your computer resources so much so that they can slow down significantly. Spyware, on the other hand stealthily wire your private details such as where you surf and other information such as personal details from password saving software on your computer to people who can be up to no good.

As if these are not enough, when you download music online through these free services, your computer can suffer attacks from viruses. While efforts have been made to make the file sharing cum downloading software safer to use, you are still in a vulnerable position since the viruses do get stronger as well. It can be better to turn to other legitimate and safe sources for music.

This piece of advice is for all regular music junkies who pop by P2P sites every now and then. The very bare minimum you need to do is to ensure that your antivirus software and anti-adware and anti-spyware are all top notch stuff and constantly updated against the newest threats. But that said, your computer can never be 100% safe since the environment you are downloading in is unsecured in the first place.

You need to guard yourself against another potential threat when downloading music online for free – pornography. The music file you have downloaded could actually lead you to pornographic site. If you have kids or teens at home, this is something you do not want them to be exposed to when they get free music using P2P sites.

In any case, it pays to be careful what you install on your computer. Therefore, do not readily accept every file sharing software from the P2P sites. Do a check at least or surf around for other safe options to download music online.

You can actually overcome the above problems when you use paid membership services. Discover through my music blog which are the most popular services that allow you to download music online safely and access to their entire databases of millions of songs and music videos for less than $49.99.

Davion is a music addict and carry do without them. Find out about hot and limited offers for unlimited music downloads. Also read his wildly popular article for tips to download music online for free.

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