Vivaldi has upgraded it’s community portal at Vivaldi.net. At the community portal you can get a free blog without advertisements, free email and participate in the forums if you choose.
I want to focus on the Vivaldi’s blog hosting because I think it’s an underappreciated blogging resource. You can learn about all the recent upgrades to blog hosting from Vivaldi’s official announcement here.
Vivaldi contracts out it’s blog hosting to WordPress.com. But with some extras which I will detail below. Your blog is on a subdomain of Vivaldi.net ie yoursite.vivaldi.net. Because they use WordPress the UI and base features will be familiar to a lot of people. This is not some light weight, bare bones blogging script. It’s Wordpress.com with extras that you don’t get from Wordpress.com.
Features:
Free Hosting. There are people that want to blog but just don’t have $5 per month to spare or they lack credit cards. Free blog hosting on a good platform matters when money is tight. Note: Google has made no significant upgrades to Blogger in years and it shows and free blogs on WordPress have ads.
No Advertisements.
Important plugins, from Wordpress.com are there. Like Akismet, to keep spam comments away (you have to get an API key).
Extra Plugins: a SEO plugin, Instant Images plugin and a Polls plugin.
Import/Export. If you ever decide to move on you can take your content with you in the most widely accepted format in the blogosphere. And you can import fairly easily too.
Gutenberg post editor (block editor) by default. You can decide if this is a plus or minus but at least they are keeping things state-of-the-art. You can also use the Classic Editor!
Predefined categories. 20 predefined post categories are now standard. This is good for beginners. You can still create your own custom categories. The predefined categories help your posts to get found on the Community Portal page.
Community Portal. They have improved the blog search. The portal helps blog posts to get found and helps unify the Vivaldi community.
I think the reasons above are pretty compelling for trying Vivaldi.net if you need a free host. If you got the itch to start a blog, give them a try.
Further Reading: Here is a review by a Vivaldi.net blogger - New Blogs - My Thoughts | LonM’s Blog
