Showing posts with label platform. Show all posts
Searching The Best Platform For Your Blog
There are several free blogging platforms, but only two of them have become quite popular. Yes, they are WordPress and Blogger. Both of them are facing huge competition. The pros and cons of both Blogger and WordPress are mentioned below, to let you decide which one is better.
The advantage of Blogger
Blogger provides you the below mentioned advantages.
1. It is easy and free
Possibly the biggest benefit of using Blogger is that it is free, fast and easy. If you are strapped for cash and are a new user, Blogger can be a great solution. It gives you experience before investing your time and money into self-hosting the blog.
With Blogger, you do not need to purchase any hosting or domain name. Also, it has a user-friendly interface, which does not require any technical skills. Only some clicks, and there you go.
2. Google advantage
Google owns Blogger. Many inbuilt services and features of blogger are quite helpful for new users. It also provides you services like:
- Robust Hosting
- Better Security
- Hacker-proof
- Low spam attacks
- Fast Indexing
- Social sharing
- Integration with other web features like YouTube, Gmail, and Google+
- Native support for Ad sense
- Monetizing option for your free site
With all these features, it is easy and simple to use. However, like the other face of a coin it also has some cons that are mentioned below.
Drawbacks of blogger
Although Blogger.com is a great place for the new users to start, but it also has some downsides.
It lacks several important plug-ins that are vital for improving the functionality of any site.
The design features are limited. It makes every other blog appear the same.
You cannot own any blog although you are hosting it.
Google can remove your blog anytime (Mainly due to your one wrong step).
Despite of all these disadvantages, it is a great blogging platform. It is the safest version of all the blogging sites.
The advantage of WordPress
It is available in two version the free and the paid. Once you know this, you would be interested to know the advantages. Some of them are mentioned here.
1. Free Hosting
WordPress is managed and hosted by Automatics. You need not to worry about spending money for hosting because it is free. You can easily get a domain-name in the format – domainname.wordpress.com
They will popularize your blog more and more if you pay $15. It is worth doing this because it makes your blog popular, which helps in increasing your business.
2. Customizing option
Unlike blogger, WordPress allows you full control over blog customization. This feature helps in making your blog look unique.
Although WordPress provides these features they are very basic. Moreover, you have to pay to increase the count of features.
Drawbacks of WordPress
The downside of WordPress is more than that of Blogger and is mentioned here.
It is not for monetization
Google Adsense is not allowed
You have to pay for each additional plug-in
The free version is ideal for those, whose primary aim is learning and not business promotion or money making.
Conclusion
If you want to clear the basics free of cost blogger is meant for you. Whereas, if owning a website domain is your aim you should go for WordPress. WordPress appears daunting and expensive in the beginning, but it provides a better professional platform than blogger.
Image Credit: designingexpress.com
Author Bio:
John Conor is an experienced blogger and he believes in upgrading his knowledge and skills by passing various certification exams. If you’re looking for properly well organized study materials to complete your exams, then you should also visit Testsexpert website.
A Look Into: Anchor CMS Blogging Platform
Publishing online is as easy as pie, anyone can do it, even without paying a cent, thanks to numerous CMS (Content Management System) that are available for FREE, I’m sure you are already familiar with WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. These are currently the most popular CMS that are equipped with a set of powerful features.
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In this post, however, we are going to take look at a lesser known CMS that I think is a good alternative to these big three, called AnchorCMS. AnchorCMS is a lightweight and super-simple blogging platform by Visual Idiot (who is also known with his clever tech-jokes).
Installation
The installation process is made simple, but your server needs to at least support PHP 5.3.6+ and MySQL 5.2+ to run AnchorCMS. If you are unsure, you can contact your hosting provider support for more information.
To install, simply go to the URL where you uploaded AnchorCMS, and click on the Run the Installer.
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Next, fill in your database name and password, and if you encounter the following error replace the 127.0.0.1 with localhost within the Database Host field.
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Next, fill in your website information and create your first account, and you are done. This probably can be done in less than 5 minutes.
Post Publishing
As mentioned, AnchorCMS is super simple; it is focused only on the publishing. To make it even simpler, it does not provide GUI for marking our content. Instead, you have to write the content in HTML or in Markdown format.
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Still, it allows you to set the post parameters such as the post URL, post description, category, and you can even insert custom CSS and JavaScript. In addition, you can also create Pages.
Theming
It’s easy to develop themes for AnchorCMS. At least, you should know HTML, CSS, and a bit of PHP and you will be able to build your own theme (the documentation is quite helpful to help you through). Next time, we will see how to build AnchorCMS themes in more detail.
Additionally, if you prefer, you can also use the ones made by the community. There are a considerably lot of beautiful themes built for AnchorCMS, see AnchorThemes.
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Extensions And Plugins
At the time of the writing, AnchorCMS provides two default extensions, Custom Field and Meta Data, which can be accessed through the Extend menu.
Custom Field: this extension allows you to create a custom for Page or Post editor. There are four types of fields allowed: HTML, File, Text, and Image.
Using the example of adding File field type, you will be able to upload and add file for your pages or posts. Then, you can call it in the front-side using article_custom_field function within your theme.
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Meta data specifies the website information like the Site Name, Site Description, Post Count, Theme selection, etc — similar to the Settings page in WordPress.
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Unfortunately, AnchorCMS has yet to allow for third-party plugin, but it has plans to support it in the near future.
Room For Improvement
I like how AnchorCMS is designed; it’s simple, elegant, and flat. Still, there are several parts that can be improved, and here is one (in my opinion) which is quite essential:
WYSIWYG Editor; The goal of AnchorCMS is to make blogging super-simple, and beautiful. However, that does not mean it has to sacrifice user experience. As mentioned, you should write the content in Markdown or HTML format. I can say that not everyone is familiar with these languages (except, perhaps for this kid). It is a very steep learning curve for most users if they have to understand either one these formats before they are able to publish the content. So, having a WYSIWYG feature on the next release or as a third party plugin option would be really great.
Final Thought
AnchorCMS is still in its early stages development and though it has fewer features than the mighty WordPress, if you only aim for blogging, AnchorCMS might be a better option.
