A friend has asked me to set up a simple blog for her (something I’ve never done). I don’t think I have time to do it properly in MODx and am considering Blogger and WordPress.
She swears it will never go beyond a straightforward blog with her blog posts in three categories (Recipes, Books, and Films) and moderated comments. She has a domain name picked out and, amazingly, it’s available.
It looks like the quickest and easiest route is just Blogger.com with them owning the domain name, but I thought I’d better ask for advice from some experienced blog developers.
Any advice appreciated --
I love the NewsManager/Editor as you once suggested to someone in a thread.
It needs some hacking/fixing from default and it was tricky using it with TinyMCE. It was a lot of messing around. But then you can use ditto (rss), reflect
and modx snippets (maxigallery etc) and stay in control.
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,33172.msg202072.html#msg202072
Bob, if your friend is not interested in being recognized with her blog and do not care about SEO and the like,
then the fastest route is to go to wordpress.com or blogger.com and click and create a blog, choose a theme/template
and she will be in business in no time.
BUT if she wants people to recognize her blog, wants to be found, do some analytics and grow, I will recommend
wordpress.org... in this case, as you know, she needs her domain, a hosting account, setting up the blog which
is very, very easy with wordpress and then maybe choosing a theme/template which there are a ton of them.
You can probably have her ready to go in 30-45 minutes at the most with a simple template....
there are some more complicated and with the full gamut of widgets and stuff but maybe she does not need all
of them. See my blog (in my signature), I am using wordpress with the TheMorningAfter template and it works
like a charm... I have added stuff like Google Analytics, SEOptimization, anti-spam, email a friend, print, social media
tags and twitter integration (not working very good right now), and all was very easy. Oohh, and look at my archives
even though I have not a lot of posts, but they look great and it took 5 minutes to set them up....
Website: www.mercologia.com
MODX Revo Tutorials: www.modxperience.com
MODX Professional Partner
Quote from: charliez at Feb 24, 2009, 05:14 PM
BUT if she wants people to recognize her blog, wants to be found, do some analytics and grow, I will recommend
wordpress.org... in this case, as you know, she needs her domain, a hosting account, setting up the blog which
is very, very easy with wordpress and then maybe choosing a theme/template which there are a ton of them.
This is where I get confused, because from what I read, if you own a domain name, your blogger.com blog can be reached by that URL (which is all the shows in the address window) and Google Analytics can easily be added to a Blogger.com blog. I’ve seen both done.
I’m not all that SEO-savvy to there’s probably something I’m not getting here.
Quote from: dev_cw at Feb 24, 2009, 06:16 PM
And to do a blog in MODx is liquidy-split 
Thanks, but I’m afraid I need this interpreted . . . (although it does bring to mind a great Mae West story).
Yo Bob!
http://andywibbels.com/2007/01/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-your-blogger-blog/
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373
//Newseditor lets you embed flash swf and everything through TinyMCE. Ditto can save results to placeholders and that way show
the number of posts next to a tag... u gotta love modx!
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☆ A M B ☆
- 1,231 Posts
The reason being that the data is not yours, it is in their system.
This is enough for me to not use a service like that. Look at what’s been happening in the E-world, I think it would be a better idea to go the hosted route and as suggested, use a hosts CGI library to install wordpress. Too many companies and individuals are becoming dependent on managed services and it comes with it’s problems.
I would go with a simple hosting account, install something like wordpress and use a basic template. At least you know your friends content is her own and won’t be reliant on another link that could break the chain.
Look at the fiasco that was caused when Gmail went down. I read a small article of the impact of this, apparently 25m users were first effected and it was calculated that it could be as much as $50 on average per person that revenue was lost. Companies are running their businesses through google and it’s online apps, one analyst predicted as much as $440m of economic turnover was lost per hour. I think that figure might be slightly inflated lol but i’m sure there was some impact!
Anyway I’d like to be in control as much as I can when it comes to my personal work, details or even a simple blog.
I was in a similar situation when a friend asked me to set her up a blog, I went with Serendipity for ease of use:
http://www.s9y.org/
Easy set up, alot of features and extremely easy to manage posts and comments.
