E-mail alerts are saved on topic searches from Google News, Google Groups or the Google Web Search on topics that are chosen. When these searches get a relevant updates, the alert is sent to e-mail account as a way to let the subscriber know that an information has been posted on the selected topic. Google sends information and news related to your interested topic directly to the e-mail after signing up on Google E-mail alerts. There are four types of Google E-mail Alerts:
- News: You will receive an alert every time the selected topic makes it on the top ten news articles through the saved Google News search.
- Web: An alert is sent when the top 20 search results for your Web topic search change.
- News and Web: This is the combination of News and Web alerts.
- Groups: If you subscribe to a Google group, you can add an alert and get an e-mail whenever there is a new post made to that group.
Furthermore, one can choose how often they Google to send alert:
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Once a day: Google sends an e-mail once a day when the topic triggers an alert.
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As-it-happens: Each time Google sends the alert immediately when the topic triggers the alert.
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Once a week: A weekly e-mail from Google is sent out with all the alerts that have happened throughout the week.
WordPress is lightweight than many of the blogs available nowadays. It is rich in feature and is a well structured blog engine which has a large user base. One can get a very quick response from the community to any problem if you ever face with WordPress. Since WordPress is an open source, there are thousands of contributors who regularly develop the state-of-the-art documentation and plugin API of WordPress. Installing,
administering and maintaining a blog on WordPress is very easy that one can do it even if they don’t have previous experience on blogging. Moreover, WordPress has some of the finest themes which will give your blog a world class look.
I will be talking only about WordPress since I am using it on this website and I am so impressed that I started loving blogging.
b2evolution offers one of the coolest feature in blooging world. It is multi-user blogging where one can host a single blog, but that blog can be used by multiple users as separate entities. b2evoution features auto-installation with minimum hassle. It is a blog engine full of features. But one of the biggest drawbacks of b2evolution is that it lacks good eye catching themes and ability to use plugins. Also the administration panel can be quite confusing to new users. The code files are bigger in size which increases the load time too.
ExpressionEngine is another blog engine which supports a lot of features making it more than just a blog engine by its developers. When compared ExpressionEngine with other
CMSs, it always obtain a higher rank. ExpressionEngine is sleek, powerful, integrated with tons of features and modules, and documented nicely by its developers. ExpressionEngine is a commercial and costly blogging tool (or we can say an
advanced CMS). It also has a very restricted free version with minimal
features. For beginners and non-technical bloggers the admistration panel can be a little complicated to understand and learn. Moreover, ExpressionEngine also lacks plug-ins, themes, and a huge user community.
On digging out some more about blogging websites I came to know about Six Apart at www.sixapart.com which is yet another company that deals with blogging. It has developed several other blogging engines some of which are free and some are not. Among them are:
MovableType is a popular blogging engine. They have set the standards for many blogging features.
Vox (www.vox.com)
TypePad (www.typepad.com)
LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) - LiveJournal is also very popular. It is a free blogging engine that has more than 96 million accounts among which 19 million are active and the number of posts per hour is more than 18000.
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