While the blogging craze has passed us, there are still plenty of good reasons to start a blog, whether it be to keep a personal record of your life, update your family, or keep your fans informed. There are a large number of different ways for you to get started with blogging, all of which are completely free and easy to use. Best of all, you can access many of these services right from your Android device via their respective apps. Here are five apps you can use to blog with Android.

WordPress

blog with android

For many people, the blogging platform of choice is still WordPress, because it's simple to use, good-looking, and highly configurable. Best of all, it's highly accessible via the WordPress app, which can access both blogs hosted on WordPress.com as well as a self-hosted location. You can type up whatever you'd like via the app, apply some basic formatting, and even add pictures and videos. Finally, the app allows you to choose tags, categories, post status, post format, and publishing date. It definitely offers enough features to get a new post up and running, as well as edit an existing post for a quick fix.

Blogger

blogging with android

As a competitor to WordPress, you can also easily access a Blogger blog via the official Android app. Similarly to the WordPress app, you can log into your Blogger account (which doesn't offer self-hosted solutions) and view and edit existing posts as well as create new ones. The options for new posts are a little limited, as you can only insert simple formatting, images, labels, and a geotag in addition to your regular post text. However, it simplifies the blogging experience on Android even further, and I have to say that the app seems to run very smoothly -- which made me want to use it more. You can check out a comparison between WordPress and Blogger to see which one is the better platform.

Twitter

blogging with android

Another hot topic in the blogging craze was the term microblogging -- a way to share your experiences or other share-worthy content in very short and quick messages. A fantastic service which can be used for quick and easy microblogging is Twitter, whose Android app has become quite enjoyable to use over the past few major updates. This makes the need for using alternative Twitter clients such as Hootsuite, Seesmic, and others virtually unnecessary if you only have a single Twitter account that you use. Of course, another great thing about the Twitter app is that it's easy to share media, as well as find other people and posts within the Twitter community. In other words, the Twitter app is highly functional so that the full website is not needed.

Tumblr

blogging with android

If Twitter isn't quite for you and you want a flexible microblogging platform, creating a Tumblr blog is another great option which you can easily access from your Android device. With Tumblr, you also have the option of sharing other people's content that you find interesting, as well as choose between posting short messages and writing your heart out in a more traditional length blog post. The app itself is very visually pleasing, which makes it easier to remember to keep up with your (micro)blog. I know that some of you may have concerns with Tumblr's future now that Yahoo has bought the company, but the service and its Android app are still high quality products that are worth checking out.

Weebly

blog with android

Finally, if you want complete control over your blog, you may wish to use the Weebly website builder and its respective Android app. Along with whatever other pages you'd like to add to your page, you can also add a blog to your website and submit posts to it via the Weebly app. However, out of these five options, I find Weebly to be the most confusing to use. Although you can add text with formatting as well as images, these functions are separate and therefore unintuitive. Also, you don't have a large community to tap into with Weebly for other great content that you can share. However, if you run a Weebly website and want all of your stuff to be on Weebly, this is a viable and accessible choice. For some inspiration, check out some Weebly websites that don't suck.

Conclusion

These five apps are the top options for a great blogging experience. Of course, which one is ultimately best for you comes down to your preferences and what requirements you have for a blogging platform. There are other smaller apps out there which you can try, but I prefer to use the official apps of these services as well as a service which people can easily get to.

What blogging service do you use? What apps do you use on Android, if any? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Kristina B