Heya everyone. I'm in a search of a blogging site, and was wondering if you guys out there had any suggestions. What I'm trying to do is create a type of peer-review, weblog journal for students at my school. The idea is to have a sort of forum where people can post their work up (not neccesarily schoolwork, but any type of writing in general), and everyone can read and comment on it, and even peer-review about the content, writing style, etc.

What'd I'd need is:

*Free site
*Ability to connect many users into a single "group" or "ring" or "network"
*Ability for people to log onto some page where the latest works or posts of everyone in the group/ring/network can be seen.
*Preferrably, some way for people to place titles onto their post, that would show up on the group's post page.
*Able to copy+paste directly from Word. The main thing is that i'd like to avoid a system such as Wikipedia, where it's all plain text and italics and such must be formatted in manually.

I've checked out places like xanga, livejournal, and typepad, but none of them seem to really have what I'm looking for, specifically some page that would display all the latest posts from people in the group.

Also, if there's some downloadble blogging software out there somewhere, I do own a server (and site/domain), so I could possibly run and store the whole thing from there. And I suppose something like this wouldn't be too hard to program on my own (simply generate something from a text box into an html page, right?), although my skills with anything outside of the most basic HTML and CSS is extremely limited.

i'm fairly sure that with livejournal you can get feeds from other blogs displayed on your friends page

I dont understand the point of blogs.. I mean.. Who cares to read about your feelings, life, thoughts, etc..?

the dozens of people who read mine...?

Try here. It's got most of those features you listed... I'm just not sure about the networking / webring thing you want.


And Temperamental:

You don't need to post only your thoughts and feelings in a blog. I'm going to start putting a "never-ending" story in mine, chapter by chapter. Sci-fi/fantasy deal. Along with a few other things. Check my sig if anyone wants to see it. I just signed on a few minutes ago

Ah, so you make stories and stuff too. Interesting.

My friends in my old town who don't have the time to call me regularly, get on AIM, or anything else and so check a website to see what's going on in my life, just like I do theirs.

I have a blog. :\

xanga will post all the blog entries with a link to it if your signed into the page, (you have to subscribe to each individual page you want, then click on 'read subcriptions), the only thing from your list that xanga doesent do is let you title each post.

Yeah, I've been playing around with blogger.com, and it looks like it could work with what I'm looking for.

For xanga, that's the one I've been using for my regular blog... I actually really like it - it's probably the simplest blog site I've used, but it's lacking the networking features that I'm looking for. Need a page that sort of has a "list" of all posts, and not exactly the full text... and xanga only displays 5 at a time, I think.

Question about blogger.com's templates: How do you make the width of the post containers expand to fit the page. The default templates are all designed for I guess a standard 800x600 resolution, but I'd like the width to expand with the window for whatever resolution. I've been playing with some of the CSS tags, specifically the ones under "Content".

/* Content
----------------------------------------------- */
#content {
margin:0 auto;
padding:0;
text-align:left;
}
#main {
width:100%;
float:left;
}
#sidebar {
width:220px;
float:right;
}

It seems like the #main controls the box with the posts, so I adjusted it from the original setting (410px, I think?) to 100%. So now it expands to fit the entire page, but the problem is that it pushes the #sidebar container below it, instead of on the side.

the site is here:
http://tejastheory.blogspot.com/

Any idea how to correct this?

Xanga is freaking UGLY as sin.

Atleast livejournal and its variations let you REALLY control what your page looks like.

heh, I guess it depends on your own tastes... I actually enjoy spartan-type sites... no dumb and useless and poorly, poorly coded copy+paste HTML designs that take forever to load and distract from the actual purpose of the site - the text.