Come Join Us

As a member of My Public Journal, you can get your own blog on MyPublicJournal.org, free and customizable designs (themes) for your blog, and all the other great features listed below.

We set up the blog for you initially, adding our expertise to the design (most out-of-the-can themes need a little tweaking). You have complete access to your blog, so you change the settings to your needs. We use the WordPress blogging software.

 How Much does it Cost?

You can blog as much as you want for free. We charge nothing, but ask for a voluntary donation if God inspires you to donate. We suggest $5.00/month or $50.00/year. No obligation. See the “Donate“ button in the sidebar to make a donation.

Why Blog with Us?

Fair question. The Primary Benefit is that we are a Catholic blogging Community. This means that you will be part of a community that is clean and free from blogs that traffic is sexually explicit, bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, harassing, or other undesirable material. We support Freedom of Speech, but we want our community to be a place of responsible speech. Thus, everyone blogging with us must agree to basic our Membership Agreement and to standards of respect and decency.

A second reason to blog with us is the very personalized free technical assistance you get to help you with your blog (most hosts charge for personal consultations).

A third reason to blog with us is the ongoing customer and support services via our Support Forum, and other support features. See the Help Desk menu in the sidebar.

No other blog host offers all three features.

Privacy options, including members-only blogs

MyPublicJournal.org allows you to have a 1) completely public blog, 2) a blog which is public but not included in search engines or our public listings, or 3) a private blog which only members can access. If you want a public blog, but only occasionally post something private, posts can be set to private or even password protected by setting that option on the particular post.

Theme Design

On theme designs, there are 1000s of options. The following sites are a great place to browse though 100s of themes to choose from. See the Bloggers Resources in the sidebar for links to collections of themes.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD THESE THEMES. Rather report to us the name and the website where you found the theme. We will download and install the theme to your blog initially. Of course, as you become familiar with administration of the blog you can begin downloading and installing themes and plugins yourself.

You can add several themes to your blog and switch from one theme to another instantly with just a click of a button. This handy to see which theme looks best. Each theme allows you to customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar. If you’re a CSS pro, you can also customize your CSS code and make other changes in the code.

A great tool for writing

It is easy to create great posts. Uploading photos is easy. You can embed videos from YouTube or Hulu or embed you own video productions. Embedding mp3 audio files is just as easy. And we know how frustrating it is to lose hours of work, so when you’re writing we continuously save your post, just in case.

Great help if you need it

If you have questions about using or extending your blog, we’ve got some of the most responsive support team around. There is great documentation, tutorials, a support forum, and a personal consultation contact form. See the Help Desk menu in that sidebar.

 

Already have a blog — Pick up where you left off

If you already have a blog and would like to move it over to MyPublicJournal.org, you can import your content from Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, or an existing WordPress blog.

Key Features of our WordPress blog software:

WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don’t for technical mirroring reasons.) WordPress Links — Links allow you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager. WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day. Cross-blog communication tools — WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop. Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis. Spam protection — WordPress comes with very robust tools and plugins to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog. Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.

Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author. Easy upgrades — Upgrading WordPress and plugins from previous versions is a piece of cake. Try it and you’ll wonder why all web software isn’t this easy. Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way. Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page. Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin’s article The Trouble With Em ’n En. Multiple authors — WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users. Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort. Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

If you would like to join our blogging community, a community that is clean and respectable, please fill out the application:

Application to Get my own Blog