What is the best free and feature-rich blog site?

Wordpress

There are two kinds of Wordpress blogs: self-hosted - Wordpress.org - and Wordpress.com, which is hosted by Wordpress. Both are free but have different advantages.

If you want complete and total control over your blog, download Wordpress from http://www.wordpress.org - it's completely free. Then go find yourself a host that allows access to your own MySQL database and allows PHP. There are several out there, some that may not even force banner ads on your blog. Installing Wordpress is very easy, and setting it up generically is easy. You can theme your blog however you can imagine, provided your host allows the PHP you choose - some will block certain functions for safety reasons.

To sign up for the free hosted Wordpress.com blog - but with less design and feature control of your blog - go to http://wordpress.com and sign up.

Blogger.com

Blogger, now owned by Google, is completely free and gets you up and running minutes.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is a companion to Wordpress.org, which is a more complicated version of the software you install on your own server. Wordpress.com is a very straightforward blogging tool. However, it does have more options and flexibility than Blogger.

Joomla.com

This is a slightly more complicated blog creation software. It offers much more flexibility, but is not as easy to get up and running as Blogger or Wordpress.com.
Installation of Joomla requires downloading the Joomla package file, uploading it to your web server, and configuring it.

These three blogging options are all free, and require varying degrees of computer ability.

Some other blog platforms include:

• Xanga
• Livejournal
• Vox
• Typepad
• Movable Type
  
• Myspace
• bebo
• hi5
• blogspot.com

The free, public blog sites

There are many sites that offer free account creation for blogging:

Wordpress.com: www.wordpress.com

• Very professional-looking templates, easy to use.
  
• More limited than others, like Blogger. You can't play with your template.
• You can categorize your posts with custom categories and tags.
  

Blogger: www.blogger.com

• Very easy to make changes to your template, add html, etc.
  
• Not perceived to be as professional as Wordpress or some others.
• You can categorize your posts with labels.
  

LiveJournal: www.livejournal.com

• This is more community-centric blogging, including Friends lists.
• You can categorize your posts with tags as well as your mood, music, etc.
  

Vox: www.vox.com

• This is more community-centric blogging, including Friends lists.

Xanga: www.xanga.com

• This is more community-centric blogging, including Friends lists.

MySpace: www.myspace.com

• This is more community-centric blogging, including Friends lists.

Facebook: www.facebook.com

• On Facebook, you can have "Notes" which are viewed by your friends.
  

Not free...

...but still worthy of mention:

Typepad: www.typepad.com

MovableType: www.movabletype.com

Wordpress.org: www.wordpress.org

• This is actually another free version of Wordpress, but it's just the platform software, not self-hosted. You need to pay for your own hosting.
  

Other things to know

Some blog sites insist on their blogs being personal and non-commercial. The material posted should be fair and unbiased.

You can also go to del.ici.ous website, and search for all bookmarks on blogs. There are many.

You could do the same with searching www.technorati.com

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First answer by anonymous. Last edit by Clicknick. Contributor trust: 1 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 134 [recommend question]