Some friends have asked how I'm satisfied with the Free hosting of my blog on Blogger.com, where is hosted this blog and if there are available any other free sites for bloggers. Yes, there are hundreds of excellent services and here is the short list of portals I have tested some time ago.

Free Web Blog Publishing Sites:

Blogger.com - Create your Free Blog
"Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world. Blogger makes it simple to post text, photos and video onto your personal or team blog."

LiveJournal.com - Start a Free Blog
"LiveJournal.com is a free service for all your journaling and blogging needs, offering privacy controls, photo storage, publishing tools, style templates, and online communities for just about every interest imaginable."

TypePad.com - Blogging Software & Blog Services
"TypePad is the premier blogging service for professionals and small businesses. TypePad hosts many popular blogs and small business websites. The service is easy to use and enables you to create a blog in minutes."

WordPress.com - Get a Free WordPress Blog
"You’ll get your own WordPress.com address (like you.wordpress.com), a selection of great free and customizable designs for your blog, 3 gigabytes of file storage and all the other great features."

There are many other similar services for bloggers where a free blog can be created, e.g. Yahoo! 360, or Windows Live Spaces (MSN.com), and if you have your own Web hosting you can download and install some of the free publishing blog tools from B2Evolution.net, MovableType.org, or WordPress.org portals.

Why have I chosen Blogger.com for this blog? That's a question...


What is the best Blog technology for bloggers?

Really, I don't know because all sites mentioned above offer similar good services and it depends only on your specific needs why you need to create a blog, what are your priorities, if you need a personal blog or business blog for your company. Many professional blogs are based on WordPress publishing software, most of bloggers prefer their own hosting space with installation of any publishing software because it can be fully maintained and customized.

I don't seem to remember why I've started with Blogger.com but probably it was because many of my friends and favourite technology blogs I read every day are hosted on Blogger.com platform, some of them looks really good, with fully customized design and with a Custom Domain Name configured.

(By default your new blog on Blogger.com has a domain in format xyz.blogspot.com, but you can change it and forward the long name to your own specific domain. So, you need register and pay only the domain name but not any hosting fees.)


Free Web Templates for Blogger.com (Blogspot.com):

When I started this blog on Blogger.com portal I first registered my custom domain MyTechnologyTips.com and then have tried to find a new design template for this blog because the integrated list of templates seems to me very limited. Fortunately, there are many excellent Free Templates available for download and the integration with Blogger.com is very simple (menu Layout - Pick New Template).

See the examples below of some nice Free Web templates with links to external sites:

Blogger Buster - Free Blogger Templates




eBlog Templates - Free Blogger Templates




GeckoandFly - Template Free Blogspot Templates



Nice, isn't it? Is there a need to hire an external Web designer or are you able to customize the free Web templates yourself? Some tips how to improve the free templates on Blogger.com will follow...