Are you a blogger, or do you want to be? Today’s del.icio.us links are for those of you interested in blogging.

Movable Type and WordPress are publishing platforms that will allow you to manage the content of a blog on your own website. There are lots of places to go to get your own website. I use MaxiPoint because they are cheap. In the past, I’ve had complaints about their customer service, and I still maintain you probably want to know your way around building a web page if you use them, but they have been better about that sort of thing — quicker response to help tickets, more knowledgeable about different aspects of building a web site. I think they may also have fixed their CSS problem, because I don’t remember having to make any alterations to the template for our genealogy blog.

Obviously, I know my way around Movable Type better, since I use it, but I’ve heard good things about WordPress. If you do use Movable Type, there are a few good sites you need to know about:

• Learning Movable Type is much more helpful than the support forum at MT’s own web site (which lately, for me, has been a “don’t even bother” proposition — unless you have questions about installation, no one will help you)
• Movable Style helps you move beyond the default style templates.
• Movable Type Plugins can help you enhance your experience with MT.
• SpamLookup is the 800-pound gorilla of spam filtering and blocking. I wish I’d thought of that metaphor, but it was previously used by Diarist.net to describe DiaryLand. I love SpamLookup.
• MT-Blacklist works very well for comment spam, but I still had problems with trackback spam.

If you want some fun stuff for your blog, you can create a radio blog, but you should make sure you have plenty of space on your server — those tunes take up some space, and a 20 MB server isn’t going to work for a radio blog. You can also make buttons with Kalsey’s Button-Maker or simply steal the creations of others at Taylor McKnight’s site.