Blogger.com is a free blog site owned by Google and targeted at beginners and people who care more about the ease of getting their content on the Internet and less about fancy features, categories or configuration options. Each Blogger site is a list of uncategorized articles for which an RSS feed is automatically generated. You can have more than one site per login. The admin interface is simple, allowing you to configure archiving and how comments are handled and to pick a template. Google's AdSense is integrated so you can easily sign up for an AdSense account and have Google ads embedded in your blog. It is free, and setting up a site here takes about ten or fifteen minutes, tops (you want to at least take the time to pick a good name).
In fall 2006, Blogger unveiled a new beta version that lets users categorize posts and makes it easier to customize page layouts.
Near-Time Premium is a hosted, turn-key platform for online publishing that includes everything necessary to monetize content and develop an online community around that content.
For publishing companies and individual content owners, Near-Time presents a proven way to connect with readers, build community, and monetize content. For those already selling content online, Near-Time is a giant step forward that leverages Web 2.0 technologies, including: wikis, weblogs, RSS, e-mail integration, and file sharing. Advanced Roles and Permissions capabilities allow site administrators to control content, encourage interaction, and build communities.
Near-Time offers a free 60-day evaluation . Commercial plans begin at $25 per month. Publishers and authors who use Near-Time to sell content and build communities receive 80-90% of the revenue.
Typepad.com does a good job of balancing ease of use and powerful features. A Typepad account, which costs between $4.95 and $14.95 per month, gives you the configuration options and RSS feed offered by Blogger (minus automatic AdSense) plus many more features, all in a simple, straightforward administration application. With Typepad, you can categorize posts with as many custom categories as you want, though there is only one RSS feed for each blog. There are numerous templates to choose from and you can customize each using a drag-and-drop interface, then save different customized layouts so you can switch back and forth. If you want to integrate other sites, there are ready-made widgets that pull features from popular sites like Amazon.com, FeedBurner and del.icio.us. And you can not only allow others to blog on your site, you can choose whether or not their posts require approval.
WordPress.com is free and has some pretty advanced features for a hosted blog. WordPress supports hierarchical lists of categories (this means you can have sub-categories, and sub-categories of sub-categories) and creates an RSS feed for each category. It has built-in wizards for importing blog entries from other blog services (LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad, Blogger and Blogspot, and other instances of WordPress are supported) and exporting your data for use elsewhere. Users you allow to contribute can be assigned one of four roles, from Contributors, whose work must be approved before it goes live, to Administrators, who have all the access and power of your account. WordPress also allows you to upload attachment files and has built-in wizards for placing multimedia content in your blog. The only cost is a one-time $25 charge if you want the ability to manually update your site's CSS. So what's not to like? While the admin interface allows you to get a site up and running pretty easily, the software's administration application can be downright counterintuitive sometimes when you get into advanced configuration, and with so many features, it can be tough finding what you are looking for, especially when you first get started.
For a more in-depth comparison of blog software, check out OJR's review of blog software packages and chart of blog features.
If you are looking for a more robust CMS than a blogging tool, check out Drupal or Geeklog, two more open source CMS solutions.
Another, very powerful forum system is SlashCode, the system that powers Slashdot.org.
Major open-source forum packages like these attract communities of software developers, from which you can essentially get free tech support (just post your question on ... their forum, of course). The communities also typically offer a rainbow of free optional modifications to the software.
Keep in mind, though, that there are only so many people in these communities answering questions, and it is usually something they do in their spare time. Make sure to search through the other posts to see if your question has already been answered, and don't be discouraged if no one gets back to your first attempt at seeking help. Also be smart about installing free optional modifications to software - understand what you are installing and any risks it could pose to your system before you install.
It is recommended to avoid free hosting sites. While the freebie may be attractive, many sites are infamous for unintentionally serving up inappropriate advertisements around the site owner's content. Also, they tend to offer much slower load times than shared hosting, and especially dedicated hosting platforms, due to the sheer quantity of sites hosted on a single server to help the company make free hosting cost-effective, since it's paid for by advertising. Common common web hosting options for a basic website such as a blog or family site are shared web hosting and VPS hosting, which shouldn't cost more than one large coffee a month and a nice dinner, respectively.
Wiki.com, owned by Mindtouch, lets you set up a closed wiki for editing by you and anybody you designate. This can serve as a quick-and-dirty host for public information.
For audio and podcasts, the article Create Podcasts Using Your PC from the O'Reilly Windows DevCenter site does a good job of demystifying podcasts (which are simply a combination of an mp3 file and an XML file) and gives a good overview of how to create one on a PC, with options for placing it on the internet. The instructions use the free open-source software packages Audacity and Lame MP3 Encoder, and since these are available for both Apple and Windows, this guide should also be usable by Mac users.
For Vodcasts, Vara Software has a tool that helps you sync your voice over (or read directly into the camera) much like a TelePrompTer.
In addition to serving out your pictures, Flickr also allows you to search by tags for other people’s pictures and include them in your web site or blog, and it includes your pictures in the site’s community, potentially creating publicity for you. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, is free, but the free account has limitations – you can only upload 20 MB of pictures a month, you can only have 3 photosets at a time, and flickr will store smaller resized versions of images. A pro account which removes many of these limitations costs $24.95 a year.
You can also search Flickr for royalty-free photos, if your Web site is non-commercial, to use as photo illusrations on stories or blog posts. Before republishing a photo, be sure to check the Creative Commons license of the photographer -- some reserve all rights. Also be sure to provide proper attribution.
If you are looking for a tool to edit your photos, Adobe Photoshop is the leading choice, but it is quite expensive. You can do much of the simple touch-up and cropping work one can do in Photoshop using a free online tool such as Picnik.
W3 Schools has good reference sites for both HTML and CSS, and has good tutorials on a range of web development technologies, as well. The HTML reference includes usage notes and provides lists of elements by name and function, attributes and events. The CSS Reference starts at the property level then lets you drill down to the values each property can contain and samples of formatting for each value.
For HTML, the iDocs site is another good reference and tutorial site. It is old, so a few things are outdated (don’t put element or attribute names in caps, for instance), but the entries include clear, succinct information on how and when to use each element, and I still use it whenever I need to understand HTML.
For CSS, a chart that lists CSS properties and the browsers that support them comes in handy when you have a tricky CSS bug in only one browser that you want to fix, and this CSS generator tool lets you create CSS classes by selecting appropriate values for each property in drop-downs. It can be used to generate the start of a complete stylesheet, or to simply generate valid CSS fragments for a style attribute you want to imbed somewhere in HTML.
And speaking of validity, the W3C's HTML Validator and CSS Validator are handy automated applications that can check your HTML pages and CSS stylesheets for common problems so you can at least see quickly if you have made a well-known error or violated standards.