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Topic: What's the best blogging platform?
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akrasne
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 What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: June 29 2006 2:56 PM
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So what's the best blogging platform for nonprofits? If you've already set up a blog, why did you chose the tool you did? What advice would you give to other nonprofits about blogs and blogging to further their missions?
If you're looking for answers, Idealware and TechSoup just completed a comprehensive report that offers advice for nonprofits looking to start blogging, provides reviews of seven blogging platforms, and offers plenty of other information for bloggers-to-be.
Read the article.
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[This message was last edited by MeganKeane on Feb 27, 2008]
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treadlightly
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: July 16 2006 2:25 AM
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We use Blogger. It's simply because I was using it for my personal blog at the time I set it up. I'd like to move to WordPress, as I've done with my personal blog. It offers a lot more features and is pretty easy to manage.
One thing the article missed, from my perspective, was the role of third-party (for lack of a better term) sites. I use flickr to post photos to my blogs. It's easy to do and works well.
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blove8
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: July 18 2006 11:46 PM
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I've recently hopped on the Wordpress bandwagon. I like it because it is simple, customizable, and has plenty of support.
If you'd like to try some open source solutions prior to downloading, installing, and configuring your own, give www.opensourcecms.com a try. Here's the Wordpress demo.
Brandon
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[This message was last edited by blove8 on Jul 18, 2006]
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cw_sham
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: August 03 2006 8:33 AM
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Our museum uses the free wordpress version to host a WWI blog. We have hundreds of letters a Canadian doctor wrote to his wife during the war. Wordpress is a quick and easy to start blogging for non techies. We looked at Blogger but it can take a few minutes to post a new message because it generates the entire blog again. Wordpress seems faster.
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RickPlmr
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: April 13 2007 12:34 PM
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Wordpress seems to be used by the majority of blogs I read each day (with Drupal being a close second), and there are hundreds of free templates available for customizing the look and feel:
http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/theme_browser.php
http://wpgarden.com/
Also, here's a link to a helpful tutorial on how to install Wordpress on your web server in just a few easy steps:
http://www.blogbelt.com/install_your_blog
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VCSFAdam
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: April 15 2007 4:50 PM
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Typepad makes it easy to look good. It's not free, but it is worth the cost.
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dcomber
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: April 16 2007 6:46 PM
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I highly recommend Wordpress, especially from a developer's point of view. Plugins and CSS styles are very well documented and most of the code I have run into has been developed appropriately and according to most standards.
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matthewart
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: April 18 2007 7:13 PM
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If you are planning using a hosted service, I recommend Blogger. It is simple to use and free.
If you have a little technical handiness with Linux and plan on hosting yourself, I am a HUGE fan of Drupal which allows for blogs, forums, polls, static pages, wiki-like pages right out of the box.
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http://www.dogstar.org Imagespace--NonProfits and Web 2.0
NonProfit Technology Consulting
http://revver.com/u/matthewart1/
My Video Shorts
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lhaderlein
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: May 02 2007 9:49 AM
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Blogger. It is free, and it is easy to use. It is so intuitive. I don't have experience with other blogging platforms, so really can't compare, but when we set up our blog through blogger, I was adding pictures and editing posts the first day, with no problems.
Personally, I think the best blogs are simple - a few pictures, relatively short posts that get to the point quickly. Blogs with long treatises are too tedious to navigate through.
Be sure to use the key words function, because as the blog grows, that will make it easier for visitors to find the information they are interested in.
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tsfbeth
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: May 08 2007 5:37 PM
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I use typepad for my personal blog and I've noticed a lot of nonprofits do. It's great if you want your blog to look pretty but don't have a lot of css or design skills. Blogger and hosted wordpress are great blogging platforms and they're free!
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JodithA
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: May 14 2007 2:44 PM
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We don't have a blog here at work (not for lack of trying on my part!), but my personal blog is on wordpress. While I haven't messed with customization a whole lot, I've done a few things like adding webring code and google ads and it was fairly simple to do and the folks on the forums are extremely helpful if you run into problems.
If you don't have your own site to host the blog, Wordpress offers that for free as well!
Oh, and let us not forget the antispam coding it has, Akismet. I've had maybe 10 spam posts make it through in about a year. I've had over 4000 caught and deleted.
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[This message was last edited by JodithA on May 14, 2007]
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maineascd
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: May 18 2007 8:30 AM
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In choosing a blog service, you may want to consider accessibility issues for people who are using assistive technology to access your blog.
Several weeks ago a colleague (who is blind and an AT user) and I hosted two audio web discussions (call the AT Maine Show) all about accessible blogging. I've put a link on one of my websites about some of the back ground materials http://www.jebswebs.net/content/view/30/40/ and Steve has podcasts of the two programs at this location - see the April 11th and April 18th shows http://atmaine.libsyn.com/
The bottom line is that not all blogware is accessible. Steve did like Word Press and we found a number of the output blogs worked fairly well with screen readers. But Blogger - hosted by Google - was not one of them. As Steve explains, there is that incessant banner that is at the top of each page that is not accessible and makes it difficult to access the content.
The bigger issues for accessibilty and blogging are the "back ends" of the systems. Many of the services (both paid, free and installable) use various javascripting and other apps that are problematic.
Personally, I have about four or five blogs and other syndicated content, and have found there to be a great deal of variance in accessibility. In using templates for the output, you should look for ones that produce valid XHTML/CSS as that is usually a pretty good indication that the blog developer is at least aware of standards and accessibility issues.
A number of the Web 2.0 application out there are presenting new problems for people with disabilities and we all need to be sensitive to who we might be excluding with these applications.
~j
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John E. Brandt
Executive Director
Maine ASCD
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moguling1
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: January 13 2008 4:28 PM
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Me and a few guys used Wordpress and Blogger but unsatisfied with the ease of use and restrictions, so we built Moguling.com, a blog web publishing tool that anyone can use for Free. Has built in SEO, Built and resides on a social media network with over 50 verticals to get listed in on each post automatically.http://www.moguling.com
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moguling4ever
[This message was last edited by moguling1 on Jan 13, 2008]
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Jesse
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: January 14 2008 8:05 AM
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Since this topic has been resurrected, and since I recently considered starting an account with blogger.com, I just want to mention that blogger requires you to submit to Google's Terms of Service, including article 11, which seems to compromise your copyright, and the copyright of others' material that you reproduce in your blogs.
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MeganKeane
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: January 14 2008 1:18 PM
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Great point, Jesse, and one that isn't often made enough: be sure to check the terms of service of any kind of blogging platform that you will be contributing content to.
--Megan
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matthewart
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: January 14 2008 6:17 PM
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;) One more reason to host your own system like Drupal or Joomla.
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http://www.dogstar.org Imagespace--NonProfits and Web 2.0
NonProfit Technology Consulting
http://revver.com/u/matthewart1/
My Video Shorts
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moguling1
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RE: What's the best blogging platform?
Posted: January 16 2008 6:49 PM
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BYW, the Blogger platform has its own TOS nws Google's own tos. Building a business model that includes a Google product (platform) could backfire ... Google has been known to change things midstream anyway, making developer APi's, promoting an app then changing app.
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moguling4ever
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