Just when I decided to take Textpattern for a test run, I found out that it's not easy to find a free web host that supports Apache, PHP 4, and MySQL. It's really a bummer since Textpattern really looked easy and cool. Back to Blogger I go (This is not a problem, Blogger is still wonderful...and free).
The reason I want to run a Content Management System (CMS) like Textpattern is because I want to have full control over my blog. Blogger unfortunately lacks essential functionality like categories. There's buzz that Blogger will support categories in the future, but who knows if that will be free.
My old free blog in Tripod did have the categories function. The problem were the huge banner ads that's on the homepage that practically slows down the loading of the site. The banners were also real ugly.
Anyway, even though I found no free web host that supports Textpattern, I still found some gems in the web. The first gem I found was Doteasy , a cool free web host that does not display any banner ads or pop-up in your site. Doteasy gives you 100 mb of storage space and allows for a gig of bandwidth use. They also offer free tech support even on free hosting. Unfortunately, the free hosting does not support PHP/MySQL or even Perl.
Another one I found was Blogsome (Hmm, the site is currently down). This site offers free Wordpress blog hosting. What's so special about it, you ask? You don't need to install Wordpress, just sign up and get ready to blog in your very own Wordpress blog. How about that for a free service. There's really no catch, except that the ease of use makes Blogsome hard to customize (design-wsie) and they have small Google ads on the sidebar of free blogs. I'm still trying it out but the site is down for the moment.
That's it for now.
