A Pressing Matter
By Rob Safuto on Sep 18, 2006 in Blogging, Podcasting, Reviews, Tools | Tags: Automattic , Blogging , Open Source , Podcasting , Tools , WordPress
There’s probably no more fitting way to end the week of Open Source tools by highlighting the mack daddy of free blogging tools. I’m talking about WordPress of course.
Stand around a room full of bloggers and start talking about blogging tools. You’ll hear people mention Movable Type, Typepad, Typo and Blogger along with WordPress.
I’ve used (and still use) both Blogger and Movable Type. Both of which I started trying out before getting started with WordPress in 2005. While those other tools can do many things just fine, WordPress has the combination of features makes it stand above those other blogging tools.
When you’re looking at a tool for blogging there are a few things you should consider, not the least of which are usability, extensibility, themability and spam protection. WordPress meets all of these requirements in spades.
The robust user community has created a wealth of documentation, plugins, themes and more recently a podcast. Some entrepid folks have stepped up to create supercharged versions of WordPress like the very popular K2.
WordPress not only works well for blogging but does pretty darn good with rich media for podcasting thanks to great plugins like PodPress and Embed The Video. And there’s great spam protection via the Akismet spam incinerator.
Honestly I can’t do the tool justice since there are so many people doing so many great things with this free, open source blog creation tool that you can run on your own server.
WordPress is currently maintained by the folks at Automattic. Development is lead by founder Matt Mullenweg who leads a team developing some more cool blogging software like the web based WordPress.com service.
[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Podcasting, WordPress, Automattic, Tools, Open Source[/tags]
