A quick review of what I said in Blog hosting, part one: as a blogger, your job is to write content that will be interesting and useful to your readers. The blogging platform you choose to use should serve to help you accomplish that goal in a way that gives the best experience to both you as a blogger and your readers.

There are several decisions to make about which software to use to host your own blog. Most obviously, you’ll need to choose which blogging platform you want to use to run your new creation. In this segment, I’ll point out some of the differences, similarities, pros, and cons of some of the web’s most popular platforms.

Unlike hosted solutions, custom solutions generally require you to set up the installation yourself. The process begins with downloading the source code from the software’s website, unzipping it, and uploading the files to your web hosting space. Some hosting providers go the extra mile by offering a one-click install solution. For example, GoDaddy and [find more] both offer WordPress this way.

WordPress

Arguably the most prevalent solution on the web today, WordPress is known for its ease-of-use; its beautifully simple yet feature-rich interface that allows for anybody to run a great-looking blog. It’s a [GPL] open-source project based on PHP, so the project literally begins to the community from the get-go.

WordPress is famous for its dead simple 5-minute installation process. In fact, from seeing the pre-install screen to looking at the control panel of a brand-new blog took me all of 7 clicks and 6 text fields to get set up. The whole process took just 4 minutes 13 seconds, but it’s likely to take two or three times that long for a first-time user. Still that’s something you could do over a lunch break.

As mentioned in Part One, WordPress is a downloadable version of the service on WordPress.com. So the Dashboard and other features mentioned in Part One are all available here as well. For the most part, what you’ll have with this solution is a WordPress.com-like blog that you’ll have more control over.

Probably the most attractive part of WordPress is its rich community–the platform has great support for both themes and plugins, and developers have spent a lot of time making use of them. There are a huge variety of free themes to use for your blog, and if none of them are up to your standards, you can write your own. Many are customizable as well, allowing many different looks from a single theme.

As mentioned, the plugin system is amazing. There are probably more plugins for WordPress than for any other system (except maybe Firefox). If you need some functionality, chances are somebody has written a WordPress plugin for it.

WordPress has a lot going for it no matter what kind of blog you write. The install process is simple, its post management are very complete, and there are a nearly uncountable number of themes and plugins with which to make your blog yours.

Not all is perfect, though. Some people may find its powerful control panel more complex for their liking, and most probably don’t need the full functionality that it offers. Also, WordPress is notorious for crashing under high traffic, so you might be in for trouble if you have a sudden of visitors. The WordPress people themselves admit it, calling it a con of their own software: “If you get a huge spike in traffic (like Digg or Slashdot) you site will probably go down.”

All in all, hosting your own WordPress installation is a great solution, and probably the best way to go for most people. Since it’s so widely used, the community support is excellent, so you’ll be able to find solutions to whatever problems you may have pretty easily.

Pros: Widely used, deep community support, highly customizeable, free
Cons: Complex control panel, doesn’t scale well to high-traffic blogs

Movable Type

Second place in the hosted blogosphere goes to Movable Type, a commercial effort from Six Apart. In many ways, it’s very similar to WordPress, but also has its pros and cons.

Like WordPress, Movable Type has a fairly simple install process–it’s not nearly as straightforward as a default WordPress install, but it’s very close. The main technical difference when compared to WordPress is that Movable Type is written in cgi instead of PHP, which is less common and can be more difficult to set up.  Still, you’d just upload the files to a location that supports cgi scripts, create a database, customize the configuration file, and run the install wizard. While slightly more involved than WordPress, it’s still easy enough for a beginner.

The control panel in Movable Type, in my opinion, is cleaner and better organized than its WordPress counterpart. Instead of relying on tab rows for navigation, it features a system of drop-down menus. After a few hours of use, I’m under the impression that this solution is the more usable of the two, resulting in an easier-to-use control panel.

The post-writing page in Movable Type is also very well laid-out. Unlike the WordPress Write screen, it hides the options that you won’t find yourself using much. There’s no Kitchen Sink button; the toolbar contains only basic formatting and image options. I think most bloggers, however, will find the offerings more than sufficient for their blogs.

One of Movable Type’s most compelling features is the ability to manage your blog as static pages, meaning that the complete page is saved as a file when the post is changed. Well, okay, but why does that matter? It matters because the server doesn’t have to do as much work to serve up the post when somebody wants to read it. For this reason, Movable Type doesn’t suffer nearly as much as WordPress in sudden high-traffic situations because the server is already configured to efficiently handle such a load.

In addition, like WordPress, it also supports dynamic pages, which are the opposite–pages are generated on-the-fly when somebody visits your blog. This way, pages can be updated more easily, but the server will be forced to work harder to run the blog.

Movable Type isn’t perfect either, though. While Movable Type has an “Open-Source” version available for download, it’s available under the “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported” license, which is basically a fancy way of saying “You can use it, modify it, and share it, but you can’t make any money with it.” In order to run a commercial blog with Movable Type, you’ll be subject to licensing fees that can range anywhere from $50 to $1000.

Pros: Commercial-grade support, static pages, and a cleaner control panel
Cons: More difficult installation, costly commercial version

Chyrp

I’ll start out by saying that if you’re interested in having a complex blog with lots of features, you aren’t interested in Chyrp. It’s a blogging platform framework to provide for the most basic features of blogging. Their homepage advertises that “Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality,” and that’s exactly what it is.

As a result of the “lightweight” design goal, Chyrp is very minimalistic. The default theme is mostly whitespace, and by default only allows five posts to be shown on the homepage. Another surprise: Chyrp won’t let you have multiple paragraphs in your posts, but this seems to be an oversight more than anything.

Again, if you want a full-featured blog, Chyrp isn’t for you. In fact, its best use seems to be as a starting point for developers interested in writing their own blogging software (which is a topic too broad to cover here). Chyrp will handle the grunt work of managing content, letting you focus on customizing it.

Chyrp isn’t designed to be a blogging platform in the same way that WordPress and Movable Type are; it’s written by a single developer, probably in his free time, with a very limited feature set. However, it’s free, and for bloggers who are also interested in design or development, it’s a very neat toy.

Pros: Minimalistic, lightweight, fast, clean, easy-to-use
Cons: Not suited for large blogs, default interface is lacking, not enough extensions or themes

Conclusion

All in all, WordPress and Movable Type are both good software packages to give serious consideration to. Since their feature sets are so evenly matched, the final decision will probably come down to personal preference, and that’s something that can only be discovered by trying. Personally, we run Blogging Addiction on WordPress, but you may find Movable Type more suitable for your blog.

In comparison to the hosted solutions discussed in part one, using custom software is more difficult to set up, but provides much more flexibility. You don’t have to rely on having somebody else “owning” your site, but you may find that you have less support should something go wrong.

When it comes down to the bottom line, your readers don’t care which software you’re using. Your primary goal is to provide great content to your readers, and you should pick the blogging platform that lets you do that to your best ability. After all, both you and your readers are depending on the software you choose–make sure you choose wisely.

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