For Beginner Bloggers! Choosing a Blog, Registering with Directories, Search Engines, and Bookmarking Sites · English

What Is a Blog?

A blog (English blog, from web log, “an online journal or diary of events”) is a website whose main content consists of regularly added posts, images, or multimedia. Blogs typically feature short posts of time-sensitive relevance. People who maintain a blog are called bloggers. All the blogs on the Web collectively are commonly called the blogosphere.

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Do you want to start your own blog, but don’t know which blogging platform or blog engine to choose? To begin with, here’s a list of the most popular blogging platforms:

http ://www.livejournal.com/ - the most popular blogging platform, known as ZhZh (“LiveJournal”);
http://www.blogger.com/ - a blogging platform from Google;
http://home.services.spaces.live.com/ - a blogging platform from Microsoft;
http://www.liveinternet.ru/top/ - a blogging platform from LiveInternet.

Everything is explained simply and clearly there, so let’s move on to blog engines, since they have more advantages:

The blog owner has full control over its content;
The ability to develop your blog technically as much as you like and in any direction;
The blog’s design is also entirely in its owner’s hands;
The proceeds from commercial activity (monetizing the blog’s traffic) belong entirely to the owner;
The blog’s development and fate are limited only by the owner’s imagination and capabilities.

I divide blog engines into WordPress and “NOT WordPress” :)

Let’s start with “NOT WordPress” and some notable examples:

Joomla - a CMS with a blogging module
Drupal - a CMS with a blogging module
Textpattern - a CMS with a blogging module
Nucleus CMS - a CMS with a blogging module
Movable Type - a blog engine
InTerra - a blog engine

If you’re interested, you can look up information about them on Wikipedia or Google.

Now let’s talk about WordPress:

Why WordPress?

“WordPress” is the most popular blogging engine. It has many useful features for bloggers, but despite that, each of us uses additional plugins (extensions) to add some functionality to our blog.
The WordPress documentation explains how to install WP, how to customize the design and templates, how to install plugins, and so on. But you probably won’t need it: the WordPress interface is so convenient and user-friendly that even 10 minutes will be enough to get the hang of this engine!
My blog runs on WordPress, everything works perfectly, and I’ve found all the plugins I wanted!
You can edit content (posts and pages) using Windows Live Writer, a free blogging client for Windows, or any other blogging client—and it doesn’t necessarily have to be for Windows either :)

In Addition:

It’s time to register your blog with search engines, rankings, directories, and bookmarking sites.

In the next post, I’ll explain how to set up cross-posting and an RSS broadcaster.