Blogging tools are designed to be easy to use. Although they generally don’t provide all the advanced features of a complex content management system, they work well to allow you to publish a blog with relative ease. Here are eight simple blogging features that will help you to create and maintain a successful blog.
The purpose of a blog is to be able to post new text or information to the site frequently, which typically makes creating posts a quick and easy process.
Pretty much all blogs allow you to upload pictures to your posts. Some will also enable you to upload video and audio/mp3/podcasts. One significant factor here is that most people do not have video that is in a "Web ready" format. If that is the case, the video may be too large, which can result in the risk of spending money for space to host the video and the bandwidth that enables people to view it. A quick, easy, and free alternative is to post your video on a video site, like YouTube or Vimeo, and use their embed feature to embed the video into your site.
How you can configure your blog varies in tools and methods. Most blogs are built on themes – essentially a design template that can be installed and modified – which can help with adding personal effects and tailoring your blog to your main objective.
A blogging platform makes it easy for readers to view your posts and add their comments.
You may want to remove some comments left by readers, and you will eventually have to fight comment spam. Different platforms provide varying degrees of spam protection and moderation features to weed out unwanted contributions.
RSS feeds allow more tech-savvy users to subscribe to your blog and get headlines via myAOL, myYahoo, iGoogle or another RSS reader.
Not every blogging tool offers the same degree of support. While some offer personalized assistance, others have forums where you can find answers to your questions.
Some blogging software lives on your own server, but others are hosted by software providers or vendors. For instance, WordPress.com is hosted by WordPress, yet WordPress.org forces you to download and install the software on your own server or hosting account.
