Finding the Perfect Blog Engine

Posted October 5th, 2009 / By Ethan Turkeltaub in Tools, Web

Introduction

Let’s face it—there are a lot of blogging engines out there. But how do you know the right one for you? Hopefully this guide will show you the engine that will give you and your audience the best blogging experience around.

There are two major categories for blogging engines—hosted and self-hosted. We’ll go through them as separate categories. So let us begin!

Hosted

Hosted blogging engines are those that you sign up for online, and it gives you a URL at which you have your blog. You (usually) don’t have to pay a penny for the hosting or domain (unless you want to buy a domain, of course). These are for beginners and non-tech people.

Wordpress

Wordpress.com (the partner to the self-hosted blogging engine Wordpress.org, which will come later) is the most popular engine of them all. It is free and includes many features such as clean URLs, comment moderation, media uploading, statistics, and much more. It is probably the most feature-rich of them all.

Blogger

Blogger is another popular one. It is owned by Google, and it has some basic features like comment moderation, layouts, and ads. It is perfect for the non-web developer!

LiveJournal

LiveJournal has very basic features, but what makes it is the community aspect. It is a social networking site in itself, allowing you to friend people, and get updates from their blogs.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a micro-blogging service (where you post short messages), also with a social-aspect. But what really makes this great, is the fact that you can post with photos, audio, video, quotes, and links. Not just text. It also has some awesome iPhone apps that make it easy to update on the road.

Posterous

Posterous is different from all the others on this list for one reason: you post via email. That’s right, email. They give you an email to send text, media, even Word documents and it will post it. Quite neat, eh?

There are many, many more. Check out another handy list here.

Self-Hosted

Self-hosted platforms often give more flexibility, as you can change the script at will. It often comes in an archive that you have to unzip, install, and find hosting for yourself. It is more tech-oriented and not for the causal blogger. There are so many, so we’re only going to list the popular ones here.

Wordpress

Once again, we have Wordpress. As well as being a hosted service, you can download the exact same thing and have much more flexibility.

Movable Type

Movable Type is probably the most popular choice for web developers. It offers much flexibility and a strong community. You can choose for it to be powered by PHP or Perl, two very popular programming languages.

ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine has an absolutely huge list of features which makes it worth the $100 you have to fork over for the personal use version. The Core version, though not as feature-rich, is worth downloading.

Drupal

Drupal is not only a blogging engine, it is a content management system. But what makes this one great is the huge community behind it, with an arsenal of modules and themes for your choosing.

Textpattern

Textpattern is a very easy to use engine, with CSS editing inside, search, unlimited authors, and a lot more. Plus, it uses Textile to format text, which makes its’ HTML very structurally sound—great if your a web designer.

Chyrp

Chyrp is a great engine. It is very simplistic, which makes it very easy to use. Chyrp ports Tumblr into self-hosted mode. Plus, it has a very strongly typed templating engine called Twig.

That does it for our little roundup. I hope you’ve found the blogging engine for you! What’s your favorite blogging engine?

Ethan is a fourteen-year-old web developer from Connecticut. He loves to blog and design minimalistic sites.
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