BlogDesk – Write from the comforts of your desktop

Searching for a faster, easier, more reliable to way to post you blog entries? Well, so am I. What I’ve found so far does seem to do the trick.

I decided to get a blog client to post and publish, so that I could write at my own leisure. Instead of having to sit with the browser window open, hoping the Internet connection stays open so that all the work I am typing is not lost in the void of cyber-space.

I have tested many blog software, and have only found two that had what I wanted in the software. Some had innovative features, such as custom link creation for affiliate programs, but only two provided a simple WYSIWYG with no custom HTML styling.

Definition of a Wiki

When deciding to build a site, I had trouble deciding content or theme would best be suitable for my site. After playing around with a few of the free services, I have come to the conclusion that the most effective way for me to generate a site would be to divide it up into two separate sites.

The primary site would be blog, based on this one here. I plan to set that up for the end of the month.

Now my original idea was to do a Knowledge base Open-source collection site. Deciding on how to do this is, I originally though of creating my own custom solution. The problem with this is the overhead. Already working on other projects, I decided I needed to find a quick and easy solution to provide me with all the tools I needed, well being simple to install and maintain. For this I decided on using a Wiki.

Free vs. Paid Services

Besides this blog, am testing out several other free services out there, such as my wiki at http://tylermac.wikidot.com. Beyond this, I have signed up at least at one time to nearly every free service Yahoo! has to offer, and am now signing up to Googles services as well. Of course, I’ve also signed up to almost every free e-mail provider out there as well.

Why do I do this? Well one, I don’t have a lot of spending money, as my money will go to my family or my business (in that order) before I will ever touch it for myself. Secondly, I am very wary of paying for a service before I know if it will be of any use to me, which is why I love how most Internet companies will offer a free version of their product. A carry over from the shareware from the last decade.

However, when I am using these free services I am always reminded of two universal truths:

• “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
• “You get what your pay for.”

WordPress.com VS. WordPress.org

After installing and running several wordpress sites for clients, I decided to get my own wordpress site going. I decided that until I get the feel for wordpress and get use to blogging in general I will instead just sign up to WordPress.com and test it out there.

WordPress.com is impressive, but properly managed, an installed version of the wordpress software from wordpress.org would be more effective. Thus, I’ve gone over some of the benefits and limitations of using the free service of wordpress against the Open-sourced software installed upon you own hosting.