Forget your stereotypes about blogs—they’re not just for people who want to post pictures of their cat and what they had for breakfast. Blog software is now the simplest way to create and maintain a website, which could be anything: a research portfolio, a conference news page, a writing forum, a lab report. Blogs let you create date-stamped postings, like an online diary, but they also can be used to manage calendars, lists of links, or ordinary static web pages.

Free

Blogger (now owned by Google), Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress.com are the four main solutions. Tumblr and Posterous are intended to be Blogs Lite: quick and easy places to post pictures and links. Blogger and WordPress.com are aimed more at text-heavy bloggers, and WordPress.com to me has better visuals.

One big issue is that your blog will by default be a subdomain of someone else—it’ll look like getnetsavvy.blogger.com or getnetsavvy.wordpress.com, which is a bit naff. If you register your own domain name, these blogs will let you use it either for free or a small fee. Free blogs may also post the occasional ad, and they don’t have all the features and modifiability of a more sophisticated blog. Nevertheless, they can be a good testing ground for you to try out blogging (you can export your postings and move them to a better blog later on), or to create a small, temporary site for a specific purpose. And you can’t beat the price.

Through a blog-hosting service

Typepad is a service which will host your blog for a monthly fee. It has several advantages of this over a free blog: you can use your own domain name, you have more flexibility to modify the appearance and functions, and you can host ads or run a business (if that matters). There are other similar hosting services for websites—SquareSpace gets good press. The monthly fees for these are not high—less than USD $10 a month. But to me, if you’re happy with paying a monthly fee, you might as well go the whole hog and sign up with a commercial web hosting package; most of these include blogging. A web host also has some additional benefits, like letting you have multiple email addresses and subdomains.

On your own web host

Most monthly web-hosting packages include the ability to have a Movable Type or WordPress blog. I’ve tried both, and think WordPress is the way things are going: unlike Movable Type, it’s open-source, and there’s a strong development community with lots of themes and plugins. I also find it a little easier to edit the source code and tweak the appearance of pages. Yes, if you go this road it’s well worth learning a little bit of technical web stuff, like HTML and CSS, so you can edit content and appearance more effectively, and you’ll need to keep your installation up-to-date and virus-free, but these are all useful transferable skills. At this point you’re managing an actual website; how comfortable you feel with that will determine whether you go with a free or web-hosted blogging solution.

The author Cory Doctorow has written an interesting piece on how you can use blog software to run a whole website yourself. It’s aimed at writers, but is just as relevant to academics.