There are many blogging platforms around, and the best of them have to be WordPress currently. Although I may be biased in saying that but having used WordPress for quite a period of time, I find that no other blogging platforms offer the same power and flexibility that WordPress offers.

I have previously written a post on “6 Reasons To Use WordPress” and you should check it out to know why WordPress remains the choice of blogging platform for many bloggers and online marketers.

TypePad is another popular blogging platform for many bloggers. I have no prior experience using TypePad so I do not have any comments to make about this blogging platform. But judging from TypePad popularity, you can be sure that TypePad will be another viable option for bloggers.

Alright, before I drifted off topic, here are the blogging platforms that you can look into in the event that you want to start a blog:

1. Blogsmith
2. Expression Engine
3. Movable Type
4. Typepad
5. WordPress

And for those of you who prefer the free option, here is a list of sites that you can host your blog for free:
1. Blogger
2. LiveJournal
3. Multiply
4. WordPress
5. Xanga

For those of you who are unsure of which blogging platform to go for, go for WordPress. You will never go wrong with Worpress just like me.

1) There are millions of free cool looking themes for you to download and use. Imagine what you can do with all these free themes around, you can practically change your blog’s look every single day for the next 100 years or so! Now, if only you can live that long!

2) The plugins that are available for download is what makes WordPress stand out from the rest of the competition. You can have more control over your blog than other blogging platform giving you the edge in monetizing your blog.

3) The thing about WordPress is it is so easy to use and install. If your web host do not support auto install of WordPress through the cPanel Fantastico, the manual install process is easy to understand and follow and there’s a 24/7 support forums over at WordPress to help you with any difficulties.

4) WordPress is everywhere and this is a sign that WordPress is something really good. It’s popularity is by no means a coincidence, the 3 points above is what makes WordPress so popular and you will be missing out something if you don’t use WorPress as your blogging platform.

5) WordPress is free. From the themes to the plugins to free hosting of your blog, you get it all for the price of of zero. Free do not equate to good stuff but this rule does not apply to WordPress at all.

6) I used it! That’s says it all, doesn’t it!

For those of you who are keen to design your own WordPress theme, there is a way to do it fast without doing all the initial coding required. Use the WordPress Theme Generator at yvoschaap.com to create your own WordPress theme easily within minutes and from there, you can start to code and design your theme to your own liking.

The Theme Generator is very easy to use, all the selections on how to customize your theme is on the right hand side of the screen. You can choose the color scheme for the background, header titles, fonts and many others. Personally, I have used the Theme Generator to create a couple of sites for some of my blogs. Although I am still in the process of playing with them, it does save me quite a bit of time from having to code a WordPress theme from scratch.

If you are keen to design your own WordPres theme, you can check out the Theme Generator here. Have fun!

I’m currently using some of these themes on my sites. If you really need something special, maybe you can try using these themes as a platform and modify them to your taste to create something unique and personal. But remember to leave credits to the original authors.

If you notice most of them are 3 column themes. Why I always go for 3 column themes is that they allow you to monetize more of your site as compare to a 2 column theme. Depending on your own preferences, a 2 column theme may work better for you. BTW, most of them are blue in color, my favorite color!

iTheme from nDesign-Studio.com

Blue Idea from LivelyDirectory.com

i3Theme from MangoOrange.com

Deliciously Blue from JDavidMacor.com

Dark Theme from iLemonEd.com

3 Column Silhouette from BrianGardner.com

For good resources on blogging, please check out my “Recommended Resources” section.

Read on for the official announcement from WordPress. (The original post is here)

1) I’m thrilled to announce that Version 2.3 “Dexter” of WordPress is now ready for the world. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more. This release is named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

2) The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working. I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

3) Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.

4) Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.

5) We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URL’s which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.

6) Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.

7) There is new advance WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You’ll notice that two of those features are straight out of the most-voted for ideas list. That’s just the user facing stuff, if you’re a developer you’ll be interested in:

1) Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.

2) We’re using the new jQuery which is “800% faster.”

3) Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.

4) The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.

5) Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.

6) The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.

7) Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

To download WordPress 2.3, click here.

For those who are getting your own domains, it’s important to use one that is highly supported by the community. A good gauge of which one to use is to check out the popularity of that particular blog software.

You can choose to host your blog with a blog software developer if you want to go for the free option or if you are getting your own domain there are some good options you can consider such as WordPress.

I highly recommended using WordPress if you are having your own domain. The support is great and you can get pretty much any plugins or themes for free. I have not check out other blog softwares but you can take a look if you want.

For free options, here are a list of sites that you can host your blog for free:

1. Blogger
2. LiveJournal
3. Multiply
4. WordPress
5. Xanga

I would not recommend using the free option because the domain is not owned by you. Also, in the event you decide to move to your own domain in the future, you have to start all over again in building your traffic and links. And many paid posting opportunities are not available to those without their own domains.

For good resources on blogging, please check out my “Recommended Resources” section.