Joe and Sally Make a Blog

I guess it is time to start making good on
the other day's post.  As you may recall, Ludwig wrote in to ask, "How the hell is the average Joe & Sally supposed to go about setting up a decent weblog without resorting to the self-automating generators that deprive the user of maximum creativity?" First off, I
think everyone who blogs regularly will tell you that the key to a functional weblog is a
"self-automating generator." The key to participating in the written web is to actually write, and if the blog system you are using doesn't make this easy for you, you will spend far too much time setting everything up. 
Believe me, I know. 

I used to have a basic template for Sample the Web; I hosted the site on my .mac space, and I simply launched the previous day's page in pico in the Terminal, cut out all the posts, added the new posts in raw html and resaved it. Then I opened my index.html file and had it redirect automatically to the new front page. 
Then I copied and pasted the content of each new post into the top of my index.xml file for a makeshift RSS feed.

This was the most ludicrous thing I have ever done and it ate my life away. Joe and Sally wouldn't like this method,
so to start out you are going to want to use one of the major blogging systems, like Blogger, Radio Userland, Typepad,
Livejournal, WordPress, GreyMatter, Movable Type, b2evolution, pmachine, Bloxsom, etc. We'll start discussing the down and dirty of a select few of these systems this week, beginning with free solutions and moving up into systems where you will have to pay for hosting space. None of these systems are Mac-specific by any means, but we will cover some Mac specific solutions and software (ecto, MarsEdit, etc.) along the way.