Nowadays we see lots of people are writing blogs for their site. These blogs are also a great source of income if we get huge traffic and if we place advertisements from Google adsense or adbrite or any other site which serves online advertisements. Even we can setup ad service for our own. Now a blog can be on any topic, like you can post blog on your daily living or your own thought or even you can post latest news on politics or technology or anything. This is like your online journal or diary.

Some webmasters are also hosting blog service for other members also where member can sign up and write for others like blogit.com.

Now you also want to have a blog site of your own or a blog service but you are confused where to start. Don’t worry if you are not a programmer then lots of free open source software are available to help you.

Take for example Wordpress. This is a completely free software developed using PHP and MySQL and runs on any platform like Windows or Linux. Download this software from http://wordpress.org/download/

Now what are the advantages of Wordpress? The main advantages are-

1. Very easy to install. What you need to supply are the database username, password, host URL. Also after installation you will be required to setup the admin which is again very easy.

2.Lots of free themes are available http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ ). If you want to pay then paid themes are available also. Do a googling with “free Wordpress theme” keyword. Even if you know programming then you can customize the themes of your own. Customizing wordpress theme is very easy and I also prefer to do this of my own.

3. Besides blogs wordpress helps you to generate new pages based on the content you write.

4.Can be integrated with other popular open source scripts like SMF for forum. If you want a specific feature in your blog publishing software you can search tons of plug-in available in wordpress site http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ ).

5. Wordpress is very Google and other search engine friendly. SEO functionality can be turned on with one click of a mouse. Then your content URL will be SEO friendly URL.

6.Uploading photos or images in Worpress is very easy and the built in content editing tool quickly helps you to publish content. Even it copies the content from Microsoft word keeping exact formatting intact.

7. Multiple authoring systems can be turned on easily when you want a blogging service rather than only personal blog.

8. Before downloading and installing check this software hosted at http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2143&Itemid=159

Next we talk about sNews software which also a free and open source and developed with PHP, MySQL. sNews can be used as a personal blogging system where you will post stories or news for your visitors. One problem I have found using sNews is that to keep this software a light one the creators have not provided any easy installation system. You will be required to edit your script in order to execute this.

So you need to know a little on php. Also it doesn’t have any themes and if you want to change the layout you need to work in the CSS which is supplied with the scripts. To know more on sNews visit: http://snewscms.com/

Also sNews is hosted for demo purpose at http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2170

So check these two free tools/scripts and provide me your feedback. If you have any similar websites developed with these scripts let me know by providing your comments.

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