I'm in the process of upgrading my website, and I've decided to start a blog so I can more easily let those who are interested the status of my projects, post updates with screenshots/video, and write about the components I've done for the community (AvatarWrapper, the AvatarDistributionComponent, and a couple more I might be releasing).

Any ideas of what to use? I've heard of WordPress, but I'm sure there are others. Since just about everyone but me has a blog, what do you use and recommend? I know that some can provide RSS streams, which are a definite plus since some game reviewers and regular gamers keep track of developers and games that way.

I find WordPress to be the best in my opinion. It's widely supported, easily customizable and extremely easy to setup. Because of it's popularity you do have to stay on top of it it because it does become the target of hackers and spammers but they release updates fairly frequently and it's fairly easy to protect as well.

If you want to go for the ease of blogging with none of the overhead of maintaining it and a ton of google juice (or bing juice :) ), GeeksWithBlogs is a pretty good choice. The guys who run that site are top notch and that community gets a TON of traffic. I've been blogging in that community for quite a while now. I keep thinking about setting up a WordPress blog for myself and then I have to update my wifes or my friends because another wave of spammers/attackers is coming through and I smile and think, not my problem at GeeksWithBlogs, it's their headache :)

As for my content and tutorials, I went with no CMS there. I wanted a lot of freedom and flexibility to post however I wanted to so I just am using HTML, CSS a little PHP and some server side includes. That's been working out great for me for several years as well.

You may be interested in this link. Quite a challange to sort this out.

To sum up a bit, WordPress is a very good choice. As an alternative, you may consider DotClear which is very robust (it has a some nice feature, like a auto updater, good spam filter, filehosting, and of course rss streams and so on). DotClear community is mostly french speaking, so it may not be very convenient.

If you want a good reachability on the internet, choose your CMS wisely, not all take this aspect in consideration. Both WordPress and Dotclear are known to be very friendly with search engine bot and provides site maps.

If it is strictly a blog then wordpress is the way to go. But if you wanted to do something more fancy that connects to a service you created, then there are other CMS systems that can be run on a webserver. Although wordpress has alot of plugins that will probably suit most of your blogging needs

Thanks a lot guys. I've been doing more researched based on your selections, and it looks like WordPress most closely fits my needs. I'm just slightly concerned about what you said George about hackers and spammers - how big a problem is it, and what would I need to do to protect myself?

If it's a big problem, than GeeksWithBlogs looks like it might be a good choice, but the blog would be primarily for posting updates about my projects so I don't know how appropriate it would be for that site (plus I'd prefer not to use my real name and instead my business's and I don't know if that's possible or not).

Thanks again!

I'm probably the odd man out in that I wrote my own blog app (which is more time consuming than it is hard to do)... It's not as full featured as Wordpress (and probably not as secure, though hackers also would not be as familiar with my blog software as they would something like WordPress and they wouldn't be able to get my source code either) but it's more satisfying that I created the whole thing rather than installing it. I've got other cool features planned too... just don't have the time to do them.

I haven't personally had any issues with hackers... spammers on the other end can be a pain. My blog doesn't get too many of them but some other websites I run get a ton. Adding a Captcha to the comment process helps a lot and if it gets bad, forcing every comment with a link it in to require moderator approval is another good way to go (I find very few legit comments include links where nearly all spam comments do).

I've tried things like blocking IP addresses (doesn't work, they always change) and specific words (doesn't work, the spammers think of new variations)... what I wrote above is what I find works best along with the occassional browsing through all the new comments to verify none of them are bad.

I've been using Wordpress for my blog and it's worked out very well. About the only problem I've noticed is the spam filter is actually slightly too aggressive.

I had planned on disabling comments for precisely this reason... I'll need to do some more research on this.

UberGeekGames:

Thanks a lot guys. I've been doing more researched based on your selections, and it looks like WordPress most closely fits my needs. I'm just slightly concerned about what you said George about hackers and spammers - how big a problem is it, and what would I need to do to protect myself?

If it's a big problem, than GeeksWithBlogs looks like it might be a good choice, but the blog would be primarily for posting updates about my projects so I don't know how appropriate it would be for that site (plus I'd prefer not to use my real name and instead my business's and I don't know if that's possible or not).

Thanks again!

Well, when you don't stay up to date with WordPress and if you have some minor popularity (I would say hanging around 50+ unique visitors a day) expect spam and hacks. My wife's blog is a good example. The spam has been fairly manageable with various WordPress plugins that help control that (although they are working overtime with the amount of spam they've caught). But a couple times a year I've had to do upgrades and track down things that have been hacked. Just last week her RSS feed was hacked and was displaying spam to people who were subscribed. Upgrading corrected it, but somewhere there was a file I hadn't locked down tight enough (I had probably made it read/write for everyone when I was doing some maintenance at one point) and a bot or hacker took advantage of that.

GeeksWithBlogs doesn't require your real name and would be fine for updates (although I prefer more personal posts myself and using my name everywhere :) ).

On the other hand, if you're not allowing comments, I personally wouldn't do a blog at all. You're just making a website at that point :)  Blogging is all about the interchange between you and your readers which happens through your comments. If you're not using your real name and don't want comments, no point in blogging ;)

Hmm... WordPress may not be a good idea then; ideally this would be "fire and forget". (I try to avoid social networking things as much as possible since they can sap so much time, but now you pretty much have to have some of it since everyone else does).

GeeksWithBlogs is sounding better and better, but is the name I enter in the registration field made public anywhere? This would be mainly be to promote my games and as such I would like only my company name to be visible, since now a lot of gamers and reviewers follow blogs of developers to get information on them (Kodu seems to have done this well).

I thought about setting up a web page for this, but the time it would take to get something up and running might not be worth it especially when there are so many easier alternatives...

Well they all have their ups and downs :) 

I'm not sure what's displayed and what isn't with GeeksWithBlogs. It really is a post and forget it for me so I don't even know exactly just how much customization you can do, etc. I'm sure you can email the guys that run that site, they're pretty helpful and would be glad to answer any questions you might have to see if it's a good fit for you.

If you really wanted a fire and forget it, you could always just do a Twitter account ;)

Good idea, I think I will email them and see what comes up.

George Clingerman:

If you really wanted a fire and forget it, you could always just do a Twitter account ;)

Except Twitter is limited to some small character count, so it would be hard to do a full dissertation on, say, a cool new real time shadowing engine, complete with video and screenshots. ;-)

Although since just about everyone and their cat now has an account there, I will probably have to do one anyway...

Oh, I just thought of another blogging platform that's pretty popular. This one is open source (so you might have more fun with that :) ). dasBlog. I know a lot of the geek heroes I follow and worship all use that one (and code for it as well, the contributors list is like a who's who in the geek world). So might be another one you could look at and evaluate.

I woudl avoid Google's Blogger/Blogspot. I used it for awhile, and it's a piece of junk IMO. All the themes look like crap, and there is a bunch of functionality limitations. Wordpress beats it hands down, and most of the themes look very nice. There is also MSN Live Spaces isn't there?

Wordpress has a nice feature where you can make a hierarchy of pages. Each page can be anything, like a set of different blog posts, or a photo gallery automatically generated from uploads, or anything you want.

Wordpress is good, I personally prefer Drupal though.. it just had the features I wanted that wordpress didnt at the time..

I'm going to take a much closer look at dasBlog, that looks awesome! Thanks so much for pointing that out. Very cool!

I'll let you know how all this works out.

You're welcome. I'm always glad to help out getting another community resource started. :)  Good luck getting it going, can't wait to see what you end up going with and what you end up contributing.

Thanks for the encouragement! Unfortunately I've only had bad luck so far:

1and1 support team:

With regard to your plans running a blog application in your 1&1 hosting package but got stuck in the installation process. Looking with the system requirement of your Blog application (http://dasblog.info/SetupInstall.aspx), it requires ASP.NET script which is not supported in your existing hosting package and most of all (CreateDasBlogVdir.vbs) "vbs" file extension only runs in Windows Server it doesn't run without Administration access. Sorry to inform you but the Blog application you wanted to run in your existing account cannot be successfully install.

However, if you are planning to create a blog site you may try searching other blog applications in the Internet that doesn't require Root Level access in the server system. We are pretty sure there are a lot of applications you will come across, just inform us what is the system requirement to run the blog we will check if its a match and give you any help we can to successfully install the blog.

Back to square 1... I guess I'll be emailing GeeksWithBlogs next.

Ah man, that's a bummer. I think you would have really liked dasBlog too! GeeksWithBlogs does have the benefit of giving you a ton of instant traffic, you just give up some customization and a lot of control. But it's great that you don't have to worry about a lot of the maintenance that you do when you host your own blog.

Whatever blogging software you end up going with, make sure to check out Microsoft's LiveWriter for actually creating your posts. It's the best way of creating a post out there in my opinion. I actually use it to write all of my tutorials as well (how I get it from LiveWriter to my site is a bit convuluted, but it's awesome for writing them!). With GeeksWithBlogs (and Wordpress, etc.) it will just post directly to the site so you don't have to use any online blogging editors.

LiveWriter looks good, bookmarked!

Sorry to keep bothering you, but am I blind? I don't see any way to contact the staff of GeeksWithBlogs.

Well, you have two options. You can either go through the "Register" page and just explain yourself there and they'll get back to you (they don't automatically create a blog for everyone that wants one, they make sure it's a good match first or at least they try to). Or you can just go through the contact page on the Jeff Julian's blog. He's the guy who owns GeeksWithBlogs. Super nice guy.

Thanks again!! I just sent him a message, so we'll soon see how this works out. :-)

You said you wanted to know when I got whatever I decided on set up, so here ya go:
http://www.UberGeekGames.com/blog.html

I got a blog started on my own site! I used the the template for the main site, and rearranged the tags and objects to make it look the way I wanted. Now I'll have full control over the blog, and it fits in with my site.

I'll start updating it with the components I've already done for the community over the next few days.

[Edit: George Clingerman - I fixed your link :) ]