Question about Blogs

[_lance peters]

I've noticed that quite a few members on Mormon discussion boards maintain blogs where they post very interesting personal research, thoughts, ideas, etc. After looking over a few of these blogs, I have a couple of questions:

1. Which blogging platform, in your opinion in is the best? Wordpress stuff? Patheos? the Google blog set thingy? Which one?

2. Are folks making money with their blogs? I know, for example, that DCP receives quite a bit of traffic on his blog, but does that turn into any sort of financial compensation?

3. How many people actually read your blog, and what is your purpose for maintaining a blog? Is it like a personal journal where you don't necessarily care if someone reads what you've written or do you actively attempt to drive traffic to your blog?

4. When you write essays on your blog, do you put a lot of time into researching what you've written and has anyone, besides some of the more obvious members here like Mike Reed, ever ended up publishing a book or writing for magazine/newspaper/other-periodicals because of what you've written in your blog?

5. How much time is spent each week blogging?

Thank you in advance!

[_Dr. Shades]

We used to have blogging software built right into the site here. Unfortunately, it got nixed when we did a board upgrade and it was rendered incompatible.

Anyway, that's what I used. Fortunately I had it all saved, so I turned the entire thing into a *.pdf file. To answer some of your other questions, in my case I merely transcribed my old missionary journal. Therefore, it had a definite expiration date. It was a way for me to relive those memories and to accomplish a personal goal of transferring it into electronic form.

In case you're bored and have nothing better to do, it's at:

Elder Shades's Missionary Journal

[_lance peters]

Thanks for the information. That's a pretty damn hefty journal. I wish I would have done the same thing on my mission, I would have liked to look over the "mental changes" that occurred over time and the reasons why I believed what I did back then. Anyway, thanks again for the input.