A blogger just like any other professional needs gear, surprisingly a lot more than conventional writers. When budget is tight and you want to create your unique blog, certainly free blog software is the options. But there are so many of them now days. Its sure pain in the butt to find flexible yet user friendly software for blog, out of so many. Needs lots of time, research and testing to come up with the best that fits your needs, I know since I had to spend a long time choosing my own blog software. I will just divide this discussion into two segments for better quality and flexibility. Since I can’t cover discussion all the software, I will just go with most popular and promising blog software.

WordPress: I will start with this one not because my personal blog site is built on it, but because in my analysis the best free software so far for blogger. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.  Seriously flexible yet can be turned into a super resourceful platform, off course some tweaking required for that. Well documentation, extended support and developer network makes it more than you can expect from free software. Truly open source software and have a large community of developer constantly producing add-ons, themes, plug-ins etc. which make it a ready-mate yet flexible blog platform ever.

The Good: You kidding right? All said above should be enough. But still if you need more it has multilingual options, high quality spam protection. Can be used for traditional blog, vlog (Video blogging), podcasting, Moblogging (Mobile Blogging), photoblogging, music blogging. You can add extra pages right from the admin panel without editing a single code. Actually WordPress has so much features that I have to write a whole book to finish it.  

The Bad: You need some reading before you can adopt the customization procedures. Without plug-in you won’t have any spell check. Lots of feature wont be available to you unless you add-on the plug-ins though it’s free.

The Catch: I tried almost every major blog software so far, even changed hosting; domains for flexibilities, the free software’s always needs some work to suite your tests. WordPress has enough scope to make something you can truly say your own.

Movable Type: Lots of bloggers priority choice is this one. It considered as second most widely used blog publishing tools ever. Have basically two types of software one the free version another paid version. It’s been introduce by same organization that brought the typead and livejournal.

The Good: Customizable template support, multilingual option, keyword supported, good spam protection methods, user-friendly plug-in supported.

The Bad: The free version does not have any support (technical or any kind). No option for podcasting, vlog etc. in free version. Dose not have developer network. You need hosting that support Perl (which is expensive and hard to get).

The Catch: Customizable, flexible but lack of support and developer network can be pain in the butt if you get stuck doing modification.

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Will Continue on: Blogger’s Gear: Free Blog Software (Part Two)