Popular Blog Engines

When you start blogging, you have several options for choosing a blog engine. Here are some popular blog engines to consider.

Blogger - Google Blog

Blogger is a lightweight blogging engine served by the giant, Google. This is one of the earliest blog engines that made blogging so popular. It is totally free to register an account with Blogger. The key feature of Blogger is its simplicity and its themes. The negative features are its incompatibility with plug-ins, being closed-sourced, and advertisements. Blogger blogs are very friendly with search engines as it is a part of Google- a very popular search engine. You can find Blogger at http://www.blogger.com

Blog City Blog

Administering blogs with Blog City (www.blog-city.com), another senior from blogging history, is really simple; it's also free. The feature that will excite you most is its simplicity. Their major goal is hyper minimalism. Although not feature-rich, Blog City is a text-based user-friendly blog engine. The missing features are a photo gallery and eye-splashing themes. Moreover, forced advertisements may be considered as another drawback. Blog City is also slightly heavier to load, i.e. it takes more time to download, than its peers.

Yahoo 360 Blog

Plenty of features make Yahoo 360 one of the coolest blog engines. Yahoo 360 was introduced in 2005. Generally, Yahoo 360 is a social-communicating tool in which blogging is a feature. Integration with a lot of public services like Yahoo photos and Yahoo news makes it efficient and very strong in the market. However, all these things also confuse a blogger whose main target is only blogging. At the time of writing this book, the Yahoo 360 blog didn't support plug-ins.

MSN Spaces Blog

MSN spaces (http://spaces.live.com/) is the blogging tool introduced by the software giant, Microsoft in December, 2004. This blog is integrated with MSN Messenger and features a photo gallery, capability to SMS content from mobile phones, and integration with MyMSN. There are plenty of features that are not particularly suited for just blogging, but rather for social communication and personalization. MSN spaces serve advertisements in their blogs and the entire blog engine is a little heavyweight.

Six Apart Blog

Six Apart (http://www.sixapart.com/) is another company that deals with blogging. It developed several popular blogging engines some of which are free while some are not. Among them, MovableType is a very popular blogging engine. MovableType sets the standards for many blogging features and develops one of the three popular blogging APIs (MovableType, MetaWeblog, and Blogger API). The other blogging engines developed by SixApart are Vox (www.vox.com), TypePad(www.typepad.com), and LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com/). Among these, LiveJournal is very popular. You would be surprised if you see some of the statistics of LiveJournal. It is a hosted free blogging engine that has more than 96 million accounts among which 19 million are active. The number of posts per hour is above 18000.

ExpressionEngine Blog

ExpressionEngine (http://www.expressionengine.com) supports a lot of features, so it is actually more than a blog engine; sometimes it is called a web publishing engine by its developers. Even when you compare ExpressionEngine with other CMSs with its features, it will obtain a higher rank. ExpressionEngine is sleek, powerful, and documented very well by its developers. It has tons of features and modules. ExpressionEngine is a commercial and costly blogging tool (better say an advanced CMS), which also supports a very restricted free version with minimal features. Moreover, its administration panel is quite complicated, which can be daunting to learn for beginners and non-technical bloggers. ExpressionEngine also lacks plug-ins, themes, and a huge user community.