I've decided to put together a series of posts on how to blog. As of now, I plan on kicking this off with posts looking at the technical decisions one has to make in order to be a successful blogger.

Enough intro. Let's get to it.

Picking a Blogging Platform

One of the first decisions you'll have to make before you begin blogging is to pick the platform you'll use to publish your posts. A platform consists of a front-end where people read your posts, and a back-end where you can administer your blog (create posts, manage categories, comments, design, etc.). A few popular examples include Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, MySpace, LiveJournal, and TypePad.

Short answer: Use Wordpress.org

Longer answer:

Portability: The most important choice you can make when choosing a blogging platform is to choose one that easy to export from. At some point in the future, you'll likely decide that you want to change platforms, but it may not be an easy thing to do if you didn't choose an exportable platform on your first round.

Plug-Ins: The second thing to consider is plug-ins. Most blogging platforms can be customized with plug-ins to add additional functionality. For example, this blog currently runs a plug-in that displays related posts, forces people to typed a special code when commenting to deter spam, and allow people to subscribe to comment threads.

Integrations: I don't know if "integrations" is the right word for this, but what I mean here is integration with other web sites. Many web sites have made it easy to publish directly from their sites to your own blog. For example, I can publish a blog post with a photo directly from Flickr.com or a video with commentary directly from YouTube. When 3rd party sites add this type of functionality, they tend to start with the biggies, like Wordpress, Blogger, and Movable Type, so be sure to check which blogging platforms are supported by your favorite photo or video sites before tying yourself to a platform.

With that in mind, Wordpress is currently the leader when it comes to portability, plug-ins, and integrations with other sites. Going with the market leader is advantageous since whatever next year's flavor of the year happens to be will have to make it easy for Wordpress users to make the switch if they want to gain market share.