Blogs

I wanted to start my own blog, but have no clue where to start. Do people write their own site for this or are there downloads to accomplish this? Which would be better, using a predesigned one or writing your own. Any thoughts ot ideas would be most helpful.

darklotus wrote:

I wanted to start my own blog, but have no clue where to start. Do people write their own site for this or are there downloads to accomplish this? Which would be better, using a predesigned one or writing your own. Any thoughts ot ideas would be most helpful.

Well I use .Text as well for my personal site. It works well and I have no complaints. I can add entries using w.blogger or WB Editor. They all seem pretty flexible and useable (however only WB Editor is the only one that works through the Corporate Proxy Server)

Check them out here....

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/dottext/

http://wbeditor.cweblogs.com/

http://www.wbloggar.com/

Thanks for the help all, it seems this .Text thing might be the way to go.

Another choice for a start would be to use something like http://radio.userland.com/ or http://www.typepad.com and move on from there...

.Text is really good though....

You could write your own, my WWWCoder.com ( site plug  site is basically one big categorical Weblog with article content, trackbacks, comments etc that I wrote. Working with the code is fun and you'll learn a lot about XML-RPC, RSS, etc. I prefer writing the code, I learn more that way. I also make available all the code on my site for writing trackbacks, pingbacks. (VB.Net).

If you're not into writing and want to download the code, which is good to download and step through the code, you can go to GotDotNet.com and download from several flavors out there. The most popular .NET Weblog app is .Text by Scott Watermasysk. Another one is dasBlog. Both are C# apps.

As the other posts mention you can find several sites out there to host a Weblog for you, I host them on my site as well ( another shameless plug

Or you could use the most widely-used blogging software: www.movabletype.org, which is what I use for mine. I'm considering moving to Wordpad though, as Perl's a witch to code customizations for

http://www.dasblog.net/ is a great .NET-based blog tool.

darklotus wrote:

I wanted to start my own blog, but have no clue where to start. Do people write their own site for this or are there downloads to accomplish this? Which would be better, using a predesigned one or writing your own. Any thoughts ot ideas would be most helpful.

Writing your own is an option. So is reinventing the wheel. I'm very pleased with the service and features of .Text as used on DotNetJunkies and SqlJunkies. If those are your areas of interest, that would be my first stop. If you want something, well, not technology-centered, consider Joe User. UserLand Radio is an option, but for me, it wasn't a very good experience.

There are fundamentally two ways to go.  First, you can use an online service which hosts your blog.  Typepad and Blogger are the most popular.  Second, you can host the site yourself, and use various blogging tools to maintain it.

For just getting started I would recommend an online service, I think typepad blogs are a little more stylish than blogger, but they also cost money.

Once you're ready to host your own, movable type is definitely the most popular tool.

Radio is an interesting combination of the two, you run Radio on your desktop and maintain your blog there, but it synchronizes to a hosted website where the blog actually lives.

My site runs something called http://www.blosxom.com/

it works on both Linux and Windows and is very easy to setup....and it isn't database driven and that is something i was looking for.