Blogging has gotten very sophisticated since its early days of inception. You can now blog from wireless devices such as cell phones or blackberry by using e-mail and it gets posted automatically. You can even post-date your blog entries so it looks fresh in eyes of your readers. These are just examples of many features that are available to today’s bloggers with good blog applications.

Good Blog Applications

Bloggers have many choices today when it comes to choosing a blog application. Almost all hosting companies offer you some sort blog scripts with your purchase of domain names or web hosting services. For example, this blog is hosted by GoDaddy and they offered us Nucleas, pLog, Serendipity, and Geeklog applications for free. Plus you may also choose Wordpress, Typepad, B2, Textpattern and Boastmachine. Then there are generic applications like Blogger, Yahoo 360, MSN and Myspace blogs.

So how do you make your choice? It all depends on the type of blog that you plan on creating. If you have a very limited knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP then I suggest you to use basic applications like Blogger and Yahoo 360. I don’t recommend using them much but there are very successful bloggers who use these services and attract large amount of traffic to their blogs. The main reason I don’t like to use these generic applications is because using these is like living in somebody’s basement apartment. You never know when your landlord changes his rules on you and kick you out from his tiny basement room. They might find your blog offensive or accuse you of publishing contents that violated their terms and shut down your blog without any notice. Also these generic blogs have very limited number of templates and unless you know how to customize your blog by tweaking CSS and PHP codes, your blog will end up looking like thousands of other blogs on the Internet.

If you plan on creating unique and customized blog, then I suggest you to choose Nucleas or Wordpress. Remember these are all free scripts but you will have to pay for domain name and monthly hosting fees. Also it will help you if you have a basic knowledge of programming languages such as PHP and HTML. You will also have to use database programs like MySQL. Nucleas is highly customizable and you can do pretty much anything that you want by using this script. Also it has very active support forum that can be an excellent source of information. Nucleas is an open source script and distributed freely so everybody who answers your questions on Nucleas boards are volunteers. Therefore, they tend to very picky and demand courtesy by asking you to use words like “Please’ in your questions. The Blog Tribune is run by Wordress and it’s also a free script but we suspect they will probably commercialize it pretty soon. It has the most active support forum and their moderators are quick to answer your questions if you run into any sort of problems with your installation or upgrade. Although it’s not very customizable as Nucleas but it has a good number of plug-ins available that perform many different functions.

Having a good reliable blog application is a key to your success. There have been many glitches with services like Blogger lately and many of its users are now actively seeking independent applications. Recently, Blogger users experienced 3-4 consecutive days of blackouts costing bloggers new readers and revenue so choose your blog applications wisely.