Online journals.. What can I choose from if I wanted one?

[NoodleKnight]

The most popular ones I know off the top of my head (that are free) are:
Xanga - http://www.xanga.com
Livejournal - http://www.livejournal.com
Blogger - www.blogger.com

Xanga is pretty good; Livejournal can lag really horribly at times, and blogger, plain 'ol classic.

Deadjournal (the opposite of livejournal, duh) isn't free, you either need to be invited by a friend already using deadjournal, or pay.

Or you could be like me and build a server and run your own journal/blogger/etc...

[jonathan lall]

Of the above three, choose Blogger. The other two have many gimmicks but are very annoying and harder to work with. Still, if you have webspace of your own, that changes everything.

[Katie Reynolds]

I use LiveJournal, and almost everyone on my friends list (about 50 people) is a FIRST person. There's also a FIRST community set up in LJ, which is pretty active during the build.

With Livejournal, you can download clients to make updating your blog easier - you don't have to deal with doing it through their webpage, and it gives you all the tags you'll need to work with, and will format entries for you.

Someone said before that LJ gets slow, and it does from about 6-9 CST. The other 21 hours of the day though, it's fine.

[Crash852]

There's also Blog Drive too, although Xanga and Livejournal seem to be the most popular.

Of if you have your own webhosting, you can use Wordpress. I don't have a blog myself, but my computer savvy friends all like Wordpress the best.

[Ryan Dognaux]

I'm a fan of Live Journal because you can make it as simple or as complicated as you'd like. There are tons of options with HTML editting on your journal, or you can just use presets and get it rolling. It's incredibly easy to update, and all your entries are backlogged in a calendar format for easy access.

I <3 LJ.

[Raven_Writer]

I prefer LiveJournal, and I've used Xanga, Blogger, DeadJournal, LiveJournal, EFx2Blog (I believe it is...), and many others.


As for clients for LiveJournal, if you're using FireFox (and/or Mozilla), you can download an extension (Deep Sender) and it makes updating the easiest I believe it can be (which is pretty easy).

For running a blog on your own server, it's a good and bad thing.

Good: You control everything, you can set it exactly the way you like it, no T.O.S.'s (basically)

Bad: Depending on what you do (program your own or use an existing one) you may not get friendly tech support (then again, you may not get that anyways...heh), you have to do all the maintaining instead of someone else, no one to blame for those slow hours ()

** Some (or all) of these points may not be correct or something...but that's the way I see the pro's and con's of running your own **

Personally, I'd say go with LiveJournal (which is highly customizable...even with the free package), see if you like it. Then, if you want later on, set up your own (there's still some free servers that allow scripts [like lycos.co.uk (PHP4/5)]).

LJ is also a good choice because of the community setup they have. I don't belong to any (yet), but there's really a community for everything.