Blogging - what's the best way to start?

[hazELLEnut]

I've been thinking of starting up a blog featuring some of the things I write, but don't know the best way to go about it. I used to have a couple of blogs for other things, but have let them fall by the wayside, and feel a bit at sea when I survey everything on offer.
So here are a few questions, which I'm hoping some of you lovely people will be able to answer:
1. Which blogging company (probably not the term, but you know what I mean) is it best to go for? Typepad looks really good, but is it worth the money? What are the main differences between all the blogging companies? I want to use my own domain name, not one which has blogger.com (or whatever) stuck at the end.
2. I want it to mainly feature text, but without looking boring. Is that possible?
3. What's the best way of making it clear that you own the IP rights to the blog content? I know copyright is automatically assumed under UK law, but I don't want any of my stuff to be reproduced or used for commercial purposes.
Not sure when I'll have time to do this (I'm supposed to be working right now, not messing about on BLW!) but I'd love to share some of the stuff I write for the kids.

[ches]

I think Blogger takes copyright if you host on their site, but could be wrong. However, it's possible to manage your blog through blogger but host it externally (keeping copyright), which is how DH set mine up 3 years ago. The main thing to worry about IMO is managing commenting. You will get inundated with a world of spam if you don't go through something that manages comments. DH writes his own blog software (it's bare-bones) and spends most time handling comments. Simplest is not allowing comments, of course.

[KatGoldLIN]

I really like typepad and at the time I set mine up, I felt it was very much worth the money. A couple years on, I like it but think Wordpress has come on a lot and offers a lot of service for free. I have never had a problem with spam from typepad, but I do know that others have.

You can always buy your own domain and map it to your blog, so that should be fine and relatively straightforward so you don't have "blogger.com" in the URL.

I think that blogging is usually a lot of fun and if you find your voice in it, it makes it easy to keep it up.

[bimbambaLINs]

DP has numerous domain names that he owns and most are hosted via wordpress. Ches makes a good point re comments, you can manage these via wordpress and there are tonnes of free thingumys that assist. He doesn't get much spam to be honest. My advice would be tostart with free software and if the blog takes off you can then move the site to paid software or have your own site designed.

The copyright thing is tricky, I know that you can code to not allow copying but that would require you to design your own site rather than use free software.

It might be worth PMing Jem for advice as web site design is her job.

[bimbambaLINs]

Oh and here's a popular blog that is mainly written text. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
There are lots of images that are in the public domains you can always find a relevant picture to intersperse through your writing.