A few weeks ago I wrote a post comparing Blogger.com & Wordpress.com free hosting. And one of the demerits of Wordpress.com is that it doesn’t allow the use of free custom domain. So now I thought of letting you know about a free Wordpress blog hosting where you can use your own domain for free. Moreover, there is a revenue shaing program where you can earn 75% of revenue from your blog through Google Adsense.
The free custom domain feature of Blogetery is like Blogger.com. You just need to purchase a domain & then you can update DNS to point it to their server. They support both full-domain mapping (e.g. example.com) and sub-domain mapping (e.g. blog.example.com). So whether you want to host a standalone blog in this free blog hosting or just want to create an add-on blog for your pet project that you don’t want to host on your server, you can use it in both ways. It has some cool features with lots of themes & plug-ins to choose from.
It has been online for more than a year. So if you are looking for a free Wordpress.com alternative, feel free to try it.
Several months back I wrote about Tynt Tracer, a free service that lets you get a backlink automatically from your copied content. Recently they have changed the name of the service to Tynt Insight & it seems they have added more features. And for a limited time they are allowing you to use the Pro features for free. Free means free, without any credit card required.
Some of these pro features give you the detailed stats about which content is most popular in your site & gets copied frequently. You can even find where your content got copied to the page-level, i.e. you can see the particular page that copied your content. Besides, the have a few traffic generation methods for Pro account. Based on the popular content of your site, they will tweet that link automatically from your Twitter account so that you gain more visibility. And you can show custom flash visualizers on your site that will show those popular contents that they analyzed from the statistics. That may attract your visitors to other pages of your site & keep them on your site for a longer time.
So, as it is risk-free think about trying it out. If you don’t try, you never know 
First of all, let me say that my current host is DreamHost & they don’t use cPanelX. And from my personal experience I know if you want to setup your website in their web panel from a cPanel exported dump file, it may become a little bit tiresome. Especially, if you are a newbie, then you may face some trouble putting the files in proper place in the server with correct structure. Besides, you have to create a new MySQL database & import your existing database there. And that may require some phpMyAdmin knowledge.
But the good thing is that you don’t have to worry about these things from now on. DreamHost have added new cPanel import feature to web panel. I received their newsletter yesterday. Now you can just give your cPanel login information & they will import the site from existing hosting company & set it up in your DreamHost web panel. You don’t have to do anything except updating your domain’s nameserver info. And if you don’t want to supply your cPanel login info, you can just export the zipped file from cPanel & DreamHost will take care of setting it up for you.
By the way, as a current customer I am happy with DreamHost. They have pretty good uptime. Seldom their server goes down. Only problem is that when it goes down, they take a lot of time to recover it. But at least we can see the status update from DreamHost status blog.
For a long time I have seen people crying fouls over Blogger navbar. There are mainly two reasons for these objections. Bloggers don’t want to show Google branding on their blog. They want to show it more like a standalone blog to give it a more professional look. And the second thing, the colour scheme consisted of only four default colours namely Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver. It often became a mismatch to a Blogger template especially if you have a custom Blogger template.
Personally I never have had any problem with the blogspot navigation bar when I used to blog on Blogger. My idea was if I am using a Blogger blog, then why not show it. It is like a mark that distinguishes your blog from other blog platforms. And I used to like default blue navbar as it was prominent yet soothing to the eye.
But it is at least good to see that Google have listened to the bloggers demand. End of the last month they have added two new color schemes that are transparent. And so the navbar will blend with the background color & pattern of your blog template. The “Transparent Light” colour has a semi-transparent white background giving away subtle pastel colours.
And the Transparent Dark” colour has a semi-transparent black background giving it a shaded look.
If you were always complaining about the navbar, the time has come to try this new option
To choose a new colour scheme for Blogger navbar, go to Layout> Page Elements from Blogger dashboard & click Edit next to navbar widget.
Let me clear one thing first. I am not going into the battle which is better, Blogger or Wordpress. I am just talking about two most popular free blog hosting services, Blogger.com & Wordpress.com. If you want to create a blog for free, it is most likely that you will choose any one of them. But before choosing Wordpress.com hosting or blogspot hosting, I just want to remind you of two important things that may vote for Blogger.
As a newbie when we start a blog, most of us have one single aim. And that is earning some quick bucks. But Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to put any kind of ads like Adsense, Adbrite or Chitika in you free blog. They will even ban you if they find paid reviews on your blog from pay per post networks like PayPerPost, Smorty or ReviewMe. Moreover you can’t even place any referral links to services like ClickBank or UserCash to earn money. Commercial use is strictly prohibited there for free blogs.
But Blogger is very liberal there. They let you put your own ads as you wish. They even support Adsense widgets for seamless integration & management of Adsense ads from one Google account.
Next big thing is having your own domain name. Whenever you get a little exposure at first, you will look to buy a top level domain for your blog to give it a professional look. Google supports custom domain option for free, meaning you can use your new TLD for your existing blogspot blog & you will get option that will automatically redirect old blog post urls to new urls seamlessly. But for the same service Wordpress.com will charge you around $10 per year. See, you have to pay more for domain mapping than for buying a real domain for one year
By the way, if you have Blogger blog on your own domain, it is not that difficult to migrate your blog to self-hosted Wordpress. So, if you don’t have money to spend online or don’t want to pay online at first, remember these two important factors & then take a decision according to your goal. It will help you in the long run.
