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A blog differs from a regular website in a number of ways:
- Content entries are typically posted in reverse chronological order on the main page. Website pages are rarely posted with any chronological order.
- Each blog entry usually has its own "post page", which is a different URL than the main page. Websites rarely have a summary page. (But some websites would benefit from this.)
- Every blog page, whether the main one or a post page, usually has the exact same layout and navigation links. Websites will often have clusters of webpages where each cluster may have slightly different navigation or even a different page layout.
- Each post page usually has a URL that reflects the title of that entry. (This URL is sometimes known as the "permanent link".)
- If a blog entry changes its title and thus its permanent link, the change has to be reflected on every single blog page's navigation, if necessary. Since blog page are rarely clustered in groups with different navigation, the amount of effort necessary to implement the change can be enormous.
To satisfy all of the above criteria, managing a blog requires using a CMS (Content Management System). Of course, this is also true of large websites, but it is essential for blogs. While it is possible to manage a blog manually, that would be time-consuming. Adding a new entry may mean hours of work to update the links on existing post pages. With a CMS, this should take a matter of minutes.
In past years, CMS packages for websites have cost upwards of US$100,000, just to get started, plus "seat" fees for each author. But the Open Source philosophy has since caught on, and there are several excellen free blog CMS packages. Many of these CMSes also have a suite of plugins to enhance the feature set, and/or can be customized by tweaking the code.
Examples of free CMSes include WordPress, MovableType, TextPattern, Mambo, and Drupal. The bonus is that some of these packages can also manage regular web pages, and even let you easily create a shopping cart that you can tie in to your favourite online payments processor (i.e., Paypal, Clickbank, etc.)
Unfortunately, while these CMS packages are both free and powerful, their basic installation's feature set is usually just that: basic. Some packages offer a fairly easy installation for plugins and page templates, others do not. Choose wisely, and decide whether you want to hire someone to configure your blog CMS, or use a simple platform that you can manage on your own, but which may not give you a lot of bells and whistles.
If you choose the latter, one option is WordPress, provided that you will be happy with one of the 50 or so pre-built page templates. If not, another option is Google's Blogger.com platform. It's strength is its simplicity of use. A lot of people slag Blogger.com because of the abundance of splogs (spam blogs) on their blogspot.com free host. However, you can use Blogger.com's interface to manage blogs on your own domain name - which is considered by some to be more respectable than using a free host.
Several of the Chameleon network's blogs started out having a subdomain on blogspot.com, then were later moved to their own domain. For example, BlogSpinner V1.0 lives on http://blogspinner.blogspot.com. BlogSpinner V2.0 lives on http://blogspinner.countwordula.com. (countwordula.com is owned by Chameleon Integration.). Both versions are managed with the Blogger.com blogging platform.
On the other hand, Curry Elvis Cooks and a number of other cooking blogs, which are all managed by Blogger.com, have been replaced with a single hybrid website and blog on http://www.curryelvis.com/wordpress, which is managed using WordPress.
Each blogging platform has its own strengths, but some are just more optimal than the rest. Deciding what you need depends on many factors, including your blogging style, frequency and the range of topics you will cover. If your ISP (Internet Service Provider) does not give you a database with your domain's hosting - either for free or a fee - then you cannot use WordPress, TextPattern and other CMSes. Thus, another strength of Blogger.com is that you do not need your own database to store blog entries.
Please check back here in the future for a non-technical comparison of blogging platforms. If you are technically inclined (i.e., have some programming and/or webmaster skills), you may also want to check out OpenSourceCMS, which has a comprehensive analysis of numerous free CMSes, shopping carts, wikis, and more, as well as live demos of each package. They do not, hwoever, offer a comparative analysis between packages. For that, you should check out Chris Garrett's multi-part blog platform comparison series over on Performancing.
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