I'm looking to start my own blog and I was wondering if anyone could recommend one blogging software over the other (WordPress, Moveable Type, etc). And the other question would be what hosting company/plan do you recommend or use for your blog?
I personally like WordPress as a blogging platform. I especially like WordPress if you go with DreamHost as a hosting option. They have a sweet one-click install that sets up WordPress in literally one-click (among many other things if you wish).
I too am a fan of Wordpress and I've been testing K2 the advanced open source template for WP. I'm not going to say that it's great, because I've seen a few quirks with it... but it's got some pretty cool features!
I'm curious as to how the free "core" version of Expression Engine is as a blog app... I've often thought of using Wordpress as a CMS for smaller projects and it seems as though the core and licensed versions of EE might be stronger for such efforts and reduce potential learning curves.
EE is really fantastic. I've used the full version to power a couple of websites I've recently built and I'm quite amazed at the flexibility and sheer power of the system. The one thing lacking in EE as compared to a system like WordPress is WYSIWYG publishing and support for image editing (within the system). While both of these issues can be resolved through modules or extensions, I know some folks really dig having native support for such as that. If you must have those, you'll probably be content with something a little less feature-rich, like WordPress. (Not that WP doesn't have features!) But if you really need something to shape to fit your content and morph at your every whim, EE is an incredible tool for web publishing. Though you do lose some functionality in the Free Core version over the $99 licensed version, I still think EE Core is really nice. Perfect for a solo blog or other small site. Visit the comparison chart to find out what the deal is: http://www.pmachine.com/ee/pricing/
Check out some of their video tutorials that (very basically) show the power of the system: http://pmachine.com/tutorials/ (Custom Fields is what you'll want to be studying up on.)
Also, a brand new site, http://jambor-ee.com just launched a few days ago. They highlight EE news, offer tutorials and provide a gallery of some of the best sites powered by EE. (Pmachine.com highlights a ton of sites as well.)
I just started tinkering a bit with WordPress and it seems pretty nice (and, as said before, FREE). It's not the most robust thing out there, but there's lots of people creating lots of extensions and modules and whatnot for it.
For something a little heftier, I've also played a bit with Drupal (www.drupal.org). While it may be more focused on handling more structured articles, there is also a blog module all ready to switch on. It's set up to do more complex taxonomy arrangements and group edited projects (like books). There are also a bunch of extensions to make it do all sorts of stuff.
It is looking like most people are going with WordPress.
I guess if it is good enough for Zeldman it might be good enough for me. I will continue to look into this more before making the final decision since I still have time.
FWIW, I totally dig Wordpress for a couple of reasons-
- OMG Easy. The 5-minute install is no lie. Seriously. - Feeds Feeds Feeds. and I don't have to do anything to them. Category feeds, feeds for comments on a particular post, Atom feeds, RSS feeds, whatever. - Simplicity. WP isn't as feature rich as Drupal or EE (which are really more like full-fledged content management systems), but what it does do, it does very well and very simply. - Dynamic pages. I found that with Movable Type in particular, once my blog got to be a few years old, it took FOREVER to rebuild if I made any template changes, and would often time out as it rebuilt all the archive indexes and things. WP pages are dynamic, so publishing is very quick.
Thanks, for the information. The more I look into this the more it looks like I will go towards using Word Press. Now I just have to learn PHP and decide on a framework.