Bloggingtricks

If you're looking for a free, fast, easy way to make your own blog, Blogger is a great place to start, especially if you're new to blogging.

Using blogger you can pick your blog name, select a predesigned template, write text, (you can use a WYSIWYG or HTML editor. Another great advantage for beginners) add photos, moderate comments, enable trackbacks, offer RSS feeds and provide links to other sites. You can also easily add some Google AdSense links which can make you money if you get lots of traffic.

There are a few negatives: The service occasionally has reliability problems since its servers are constantly busy. It's not a big deal and is nothing to be concerned about unless 24/7 perfect uptime stats are important to you. You also need to be very skilled at HTML, CSS and other technologies if you want to heavily modify the Blogger templates. And you can't add categories - this is one thing that sours advanced bloggers. Otherwise, it should suit your needs unless you want a highly-customizable and configurable blogging platform and in that case, you'll need to spend some money and look elsewhere.

I use Blogger because it's easy and can be used either on a free hosted server provided by Google (who owns Blogger) or on a private server. Since I have my own server, I prefer this route. I don't have to worry about down time since my server is well maintained. I also like Blogger because it doesn't just re-route my URL - it maps to it, meaning I will get better search results. More about URLs and DNS routing in another post.

I do want to mention that I also use another more advanced service called Word Press which you may also want to investigate.

Good luck and let me know when you write your first post!