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What to Watch for: Choosing a Trustworthy Blog Service or Software
FREE BLOGS! Our pick for the best free blog service is Blogger aka BlogSpot. Whoa there - before you rush off to get married, let's remove the rose-colored glasses and check the pros and cons. Do the free blogs give you enough control over the look and feel of your blog to satisfy your creative style? While millions of blog newbies start with a free blog service, successful bloggers often wish to move on to gain features, space and speed. Does the free service you are looking at offer an easy way for you to download your whole blog, import from or export to other blog formats? If you'd like to spice up your blog with photos, video and sound, get ready to hit roadblocks or take some technical twists and turns with free blogs. Check the support forum for Blogger's photo add on - a multiple additional sign-up and download system involving Hello and Picasa: . Also take a gander at the current list of "known issues" for Blogger and any other free blog service you are considering. This will give you a good look at the limitations you may hit or problems you may encounter. Here are the concise(?) instructions for including photos or images in a Blogger blog. Essentially you need to use extra steps of third party services or servers to display photos in a Blogger blog. I have tried Picasa as a photo finder / organizer and at first blush I love it (PC only sorry Linux and Mac.) But it has crashed on occassion and it looks like the chain of Picasa - Hello - Blogger is not yet mature. Other free blogging services: We notice several "free" services issuing warnings about other "fake" free blog services. In doing this review, I found out what they mean by "fake free." Frankly I was surprised the misleading words came from a top brand, TypePad. I clicked on a "Set up your blog for free" ad - but there were no free options for the blog service. The most "real" free services are probably those of generous, well-meaning people doing their best to keep giving the world free services, with little or no economic resources. Features are sparse - you may be limited to just text, non-commercial, and little or no control over style, color, and layout. While we fell in love with the guys behind Pyra (Blogger and BlogSpot), remember when using other free blog services who weren't bought by Google - you may be putting your content in the hands of nice people who - as Blogger's "About" story tells it "we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days)". Most free blog services show ads prominently within your blog. You can actually do better on your own if you are ok with ads. By getting a low cost blog instead of a "free" one and running YOUR OWN ads - you get the ad revenue and you control the quality of the ad. Please let us know if you hear of a truly excellent free blog option with solid financial backing, a wide range of layouts, customizability, no ads and cool features. We'd like to add it here. CHEAP BLOGS! It's no secret - any dependable blog is an excellent value compared to hardcopy publishing, print advertisting, or traditional re-invent-the-wheel websites. The best of today's blog software instantly creates a "content management" website for you with layouts and features equivalent to traditional websites costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. So our look at CHEAP BLOGS! means the bottom of the line offerings from reputable blog service and software vendors.
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