After 3 years or so I’m thinking of coming back to RW to get a new site off the ground. This will be an extremely small site with no real income potential so I can’t spend a TOO much on plug-ins, etc…
On this site ,I will need a blog. Mainly text based but with a few pics thrown in, here and there. Several years back I used a self-installed copy of WordPress and the WP-Blog plugin, which worked great for me but I understand now is no longer supported/updated.
What are my options for a good solid blog that is both inexpensive and reliable* long-term.
In regard to being reliable, it’s important the solution hosting the actual content is likely to remain around and supported in the future. Such as in the previously mentioned instance, even though WP-Blog was discontinued my content was still safe on WP.
I’ve read about some stacks based blogs but I guess it concerns me that the stack might break with an update to RW, etc… and access to the content along with it. I, also, sort of like the idea of being able to update the blog without having to open RW but I’m not sure how important that is here, currently.
If you don’t need to update the blog from outside of RW then the built-in Blog page works OK. There are probably some fancy things you can’t do with it but for text and photos etc. it’s pretty good - and free.
Again, if you don’t need to update outside of RW, lots of people love the Poster stack from Instacks. It’s a clever, more modern-looking blog. And because it’s Stacks-based, much more flexible.
If you do need to update outside of RW, then your cheapest option is the Microblog stack which brings a Tumblr blog into your site.
The new Blogger stacks let you bring in a Blogger blog into your site.
Then you can got the CMS route with Total CMS or Nick Cates’ GoCMS stacks (which include a blog) or Pulse (which I’m afraid I don’t know so well).
And don’t forget Armadillo which has its quirks but is also really useful.
If you provide more details we can probably answer better. But, by far, the best within-RW option for blogging is Poster. No reason to believe it won’t be around for awhile. Super flexible. No need to use WordPress (based on what you’ve written).