Some things I would like to write about this week: Colin Powell as tragic superhero, advice to Nicholas Sarkozy, upcoming Vancouver events (Jazz Festival, Portuguese Heritage), film reviews (‘Touch of Evil’, ‘Waitress’, ‘Tokyo Drifter’, ‘Unforgiven’ etc), more links to sites for blog and RSS submission, a detailed review of free WordPress MU hosting sites, guide to ‘borrowing’ MySpace media …

Here is a short list of some of the easiest (and of course free) places to submit your blog quickly to get a little more exposure. This first post lists sites that do not require registration for submission. I will post another list with those that do shortly.

1) Technorati – Registration not required, but I would recommend that you claim your blog by registering after you submit it.
2) Pingoat – Just pick the services you want to ping and hit the button. Voila!
3) Pingomatic – Works like Pingoat. WordPress pings Pingomatic whenever your blog is updated, but you can do it manually too. [9 more free services to follow]
4) Google Blog Search – Definitely submit your blog(s) here. No registration required.
5) Blogflux – Add your blog to this directory as well.
6) Blo.gs – another one to add.
7) IceRocket – and one more.
8] BlogPulse – No registration required, but an email address is.
9) Best of the Web Blogs (BOTW.org) – This one works a lot like Yahoo: you will need to find the most appropriate category for your blog and then click its “Submit Blog” link. The editors approve all submissions manually and recommend that you have at least 6 months of posts and quality content.

For the second part, you will need to know your blog’s RSS feed address. This is usually as simple as adding “/feed/” to the web address of your blog home page. For example, this blog’s feed is at http://dubesor.wordpress.com/feed/.
1) Blogdigger – submit your RSS feed address to this site.
2) DayPop – another RSS feed submission.
3) WeBlogALot – here’s one more.

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I went looking for places to start experimenting with the WordPress platform for free before shelling out for full-on paid WordPress hosting [that still remains my preferred option and I'm looking into a Canadian host for this - details in an upcoming post]. Here are the results of my research into free WordPress hosting services out there on the interweb.
The only hosts that remained after ruling out defunct and ad-driven sites (see note at the end of post): Blogsome.com, WordPress.com and Blogetery.com. Read on to find out how they fare in my rating on a scale of 10.

[5/10] Blogsome – allows file edit and upload up to 1MB, has 27 themes and 10 plugins and an excellent stats view using Analog 5.32 from analog.cx. You can also edit the code using their online editor – very useful for customizing your CSS stylesheet. Blogsome doesn’t have the “Presentation” tab enabled in your blog admin site, which means you cannot play around with widgets. That’s a very big negative in my books.

[7/10] Blogetery – this is a quickly growing blog hosting site and the administrators will quickly adopt user feedback (eg. when you suggest new WordPress themes for them to enable). They already offer well over 100 different themes, which alone is a great benefit. They offer a few plugins, the best of which are Sociable and the Flickr Badge Widget. Unfortunately, they don’t yet have any sort of stats, but soon might. They also don’t have a tag cloud plugin. All in all, this is a great site and the only thing against it is the lack of stats and the fact that you won’t be getting any traffic from their front page, as this site is still a relative unkown (their rank on Alexa is 800,000 versus 2,000 for Blogsome and top 100 for WordPress.com). The only uploads they allow are directly through the post – it’s unclear what the maximum upload capacity is here. Read on for a review and rating of WordPress.com.

[8/10] WordPress.com – This is not to be confused with WordPress.org, the site for the standalone WordPress system you would install on an outside hosting account or your own web server. If you blog about popular topics, they can bring some traffic to your blog through their main page, which is listed in the top 100 most visited sites on Alexa. That’s a pretty big deal as far as I’m concerned. They allow 50 MB of uploads. You can attach a domain name you already own to your free hosting account, which is really cool. They also offer blog stats and feed stats (to see which feed readers your subscribed visitors use to read your posts) right from your admin dashboard. This service has the best plugins including a Tag Cloud for categorizing your posts and Akismet for blocking comment spam. There’s also a Snap Preview plugin for outgoing links and a number of widgets you can put on the sidebar (Box.net, Meebo, Palatial Map Kit, Sonific and Vod:pod). At the moment, they offer 56 themes to choose from for your blog. You can opt to pay them to a) be able to edit your CSS stylesheet and/or b) have more storage space (1GB or 5GB). I think the only complaints I have against them are : my blog wasn’t crawled properly by Google – maybe they are limiting GoogleBot in some way as only the main blog page got included in the index; they don’t have a random flickr plugin for the sidebar – only one that shows the newest photos; they don’t offer my favorite theme, Vistered Little .

Let’s also mention defunct blog hosting sites – as far as I can tell, blogthing.com and wpblogs.net are either inactive or no longer accept new blog registration. Another service I found, letsblogit.net, puts ads on their users’ pages. Yet another site, iblog365.com, does not allow plugins, which hinders your blogging options quite a bit, although they do have a nice choice of themes for your blog.

For now, I keep my Funcouver blog on both WordPress.com and Blogetery.com, but I’d like to soon move it entirely to WordPress.com and then to my own hosting, which I will post about soon. I hope this helped some people out there with their free WordPress hosting needs.

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