About ItsAPundit

January 26th, 2007 by Basil

ItsAPundit.com is now a free blogging platform.

Yes, it's free. Just sign up for a blog and start posting. It's that quick and it's that easy.

It's powered by WordPress MU. And, yes, it's a lot like WordPress.com …with a few small, but critical differences.

Ads

The difference most will notice are ads. As a pundit at ItsAPundit.com, you can have ads on your blog.

WordPress.com, of course, doesn't allow ads, although they do insert small, unobtrusive ads onto their blogs.

We also reserve the right to insert a single ad on a blog page. And we feel it's only fair for you to be able to do the same on your own blog.

Theme Customization

We allow limited customization (colors and graphics only) of your blog.

While WordPress.com does allow for more customization via CSS, they charge you for it. Customization here, though somewhat limited, is free.

Comments and TrackBacks

We include widgets for separating comments from trackbacks/pingbacks in your sidebar.

The WordPress standard is to combine them. And you can do that here, too. But if you prefer to separate recent comments from recent trackbacks/pingbacks in the sidebar, you have that option.

Locking Comments

As a spam-fighting measure, posts are locked for commenting once two conditions are met: the post is over 120 days old, and no one has commented in 60 days.

However, you can adjust these settings for your own blog. Including turning comment locking off.

Video

ItsAPundit.com supports insertion of video in your posts, via the Anarchy Media Player.

That means your posts can have, among other formats, YouTube, Google, Revver, Dailymotion, iMix, MP3, FLV, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player content.

SpamKarma

While WordPress.com offers the excellent Akismet application to fight comment spam, ItsAPundit runs the also-excellent SpamKarma 2.

And, if you have an Akismet API key, you can turn Akismet on for your blog here, too.

Plugins

While we have turned on some plugins by default, as WordPress.com does, we also allow you to turn some plug-ins on or off.

Presently, the list of available plugins is small (Akismet, Unfancy Quote), we'll be adding more based upon requests and an approval process.

Stats

At ItsAPundit.com, we offer the ability to use both Site Meter and StatCounter.

ItsAPundit.com includes the Site Meter plugin by David Smith that gives you full Site Meter functionality. We also have adapted the plugin as a Widget so it can be placed in your sidebar.

And, we also have a Widget for use with your StatCounter account, if you prefer to use their stats.

Themes

ItsAPundit offers many of the same themes as WordPress.com.

We don't have all the ones they offer. But we do offer some they don't.

We test the themes in Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 6 prior to adding them to the library. We can't guarantee all of the themes will work exactly as desired in all browsers, despite our testing.

The Catch

Of course there's a catch.

On your blog, we reserve the right to display an invisible Sitemeter counter.

We also reserve the right to place a single ad on your blog page.

Our plan is simple: All of the blogs here are part of the ItsAPundit.com network. (And we'd love to have you as part of that network.) And while we allow you to count your individual blog stats via a Sitemeter widget, we want to count the total network usage.

Once we have a network established, we plan to sell ads on the network. And that would mean a single ad would appear somewhere on your blog (in most cases, the sidebar).

Of course, you have the ability to insert your own HTML (or widgetized) ads on your blog.

Get started. Create your new blog now.