This is the first of a series of posts that will teach you how to open a personal blog for free and the tools/services available to manage it. In the guide i considered the three main blogging services: WordPress, Tumblr e Blogger.
The first, born in 2003, it’s a traditional blogging platform with text based articles with the feature that you can add photos, videos and interactive content. You can sort them by categories and add static pages. It’s expandible with widgets and plugins.
Tumblr, born in 2007 it is grown fast and became so popular, now it’s a serious competitor of the other two platforms. Is considered as a micro blogging platform. It offers different method for posting: based on text, photo, audio, video.Has social features: you can follow other blogs and be followed, you can like a post of another blor or republish on your blog, you can answer to a post, you can make questions a. You can’t use comments, you must use an external service.
Blogger, born in 1999 and then acquired by Google in 2002, it’s a traditional blogging system too with comments available and categorization by labels, we also have static pages and widgets. Social features with Google Friend Connect service you can follow other Blogger users.
All the three services host your blog using third level domain, so yourname.wordpress.com, yourname.tumblr.com and yourname.blogspot.com.
To open a blog on WordPress you must register on the site. In the form you must specify the form address and choose the domain (WordPress.com is free, but you can also choose paid domains .com or .net or .org), select a username, password and specify mail address and the blog language.
Tumblr is fast and easy, you must specify e-mail address, password and URL.
To use Blogger you must have a Google account. Then you can specify the author name of posts, the blog name and a template to choose.
In the next part we will see the 3 services how they works.