Best blog publishing platforms to start blogging right away
The major difference between blog publishing platforms from your own hosted blog website is that you do not have to setup anything and can just create your account and start blogging in less than a minute. And there is also a ton of readership already available on the platform itself, you just have to make yourself discoverable. Yes, they are other lot of differences that you can check out here, Ways to setup your blog. But where to start publishing? There are multiple platforms available, let’s learn their pros and cons.
Major platforms available
There are multiple blog publishing platforms available, with varied features for reading as well as writing, extensibility. Let’s list out the major ones:
Wordpress
Wordpress is a free and open-source Content Management System(CMS) and a go to solution to deploy websites on the internet. Instead of deploying wordpress on your servers, a hosted and managed service is provided at wordpress.com, where you can deploy a website on a wordpress.com subdomain, for example, myawesomeblog.wordpress.com completely free of cost. But only the basic features of wordpress CMS are provided, to unlock other features a 4 tiered plan is provided.
After logging in, a reader view is provided, which is kind of a RSS reader. You can discover articles, follow your interests, share articles, etc. All these articles are from the wordpress.com hosted websites. For writing blog posts, you will be welcomed by a stripped out version of wordpress CMS, where you can achieve most of your blogging needs such as, writing and sharing posts, theming your website, edit menus, add pages, etc. It has all and more than the features you require, like excellent text editor and post creator, where you can embed and include any kind of content available on the web, owing to the html editor available alongside.
Wordpress is an extensive CMS built on php and mysql, with a very large community, the largest in the software world. You can find infinite themes, plugins, features to add to your blog. The plugins are so extensive that you can create an entire E-commerce website with wordpress, including payments. But wordpress is built on much older technologies, which plagues the speed and interfaces of websites built over it. The websites built with wordpress.com are plain old php pages with legacy code which makes adding new functionality very difficult and prone to security bugs. Wordpress websites all over the world are daily attacked by scripts looking out to take advantage of any kind of security loophole. Wordpress is now being slowly replaced by newer, faster and more secure frameworks built on new technologies, but to quickly create an extensive website, nothing beats it even now.
Tumblr
Tumblr, owned by Yahoo, is a publishing network of creative content. After signing in to Tumblr you are asked to make a profile to consume as well as post content. You become a part of a global social network and world of hash tags, where you post photos, videos, gifs, audios, links, quotes, text, etc. You are also provided with your blog at a sub-domain username.tumblr.com free of cost, which is like your public profile with a list of all the content you have posted.
While the text editing capabilities are good, but the whole network seems more conducive to visual and creative content. If your blogging plans contain less text and more creatives then, Tumblr is the best publishing network for you. Tumblr has good theming options to change the look and feel of the blog, but are limited to blog style, not as extensive as wordpress. There is also excellent support of the tumblr social network by which people can like, share and reblog the posts to increase the reach.
Medium
Medium is the new generation’s publishing platform which evolved due to the need of people to be able to consume and publish quality content effortlessly without the frills of the existing blogging world. It has achieved this due to the sole focus on content, achieved by integrating latest technology and clean UI design elements of the new age. There is a pull in the platform itself which evokes the writer in you and doesn’t block your creativity with non-essential stuff.
Medium has excellent network of readership owing to its ability to aggregate the topics you want to follow. After logging in you can follow the topics of your interest and create you feed, you are provided with a medium.com/@username as your profile/blog page. Medium has excellent and clean post creator based on markdown. Readers can recommend, share and comment on the posts, popular posts eventually come to the front pages of medium or the related topics/tags.
Svtble
Svbtle is the new kid in the block, focussing on bringing your inner writer to create content. It tries to convert your ideas into posts by allowing you to keep a tab on them, build on them and finally publish them. Svtble has no free plan, it starts from $6 per month or $70 per year. It focuses on clean content delivery to users and focuses on content being mobile first. It also has recommendation system which collects kudos from readers without the need of logging in, which means a single person can give multiple kudos to a single post. On the premise of cleaner content delivery and easy content creation, Svbtle asks too much while similar platforms like Medium provides the same at no cost at all.
