I'm new to blogging, and have only used blogger and wordpress a little bit. What is the best platform to publish my blog on?

I wrote the software for the 24 Beers blog.

When starting a blog you need to think about what you intend to use your blog for.  Things to consider are how much functionality you need, security, whether you want to use the blog to push traffic to another web site, how much control of the software you need.

Both WordPress and Tumblr have great social features that make it easy for your readers to share your posts.  WordPress plugins enable you to add new features to your blog too, although some plugins could cause your blog to load slower.

To limit your exposure to security vulnerabilities, hosting headaches and bandwidth usage you could go with a hosted blog, such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.  These all have the benefit of only needing to fill in a form and you're ready to start blogging.  You can also use your own domain name as the URL for your blog, such as "blog.mydomain.com".  The downside is that you cannot give it a URL like "www.mydomain.com/blog" so isn't good if you need to retain any SEO the blog creates within an existing web site.

WordPress have been in the new lately with a huge attack mounted on their web servers.  A company I previously worked with also had their blog server compromised when running WordPress on their own server.

The upside to downloading blog software and running it on your own server is that you have complete control over the software.  WordPress famously only takes 5 minutes to install and configure on your web server.  The benefit of running on your own web server is that you can host your blog under a subdirectory URL, such as "www.mydomain.com/blog", which is great for SEO.

Another option, which is what I've done at 24 Beers, is to write your own blog software.  It's only really a viable option if you have the skills to do it but, if you do, it's not that difficult.  The reason I wrote our own is we some very specific requirements:

• the blog must be hosted under a subdirectory URL;
• it must be very fast to load pages;
• we must be able to integrate it into any of our backend datasources;
• we must be able to develop new features and make changes very quickly;
• 99% of the features of blog software aren't needed.

I really would recommend your own domain and space.

With a host with simple scripts installer (should only cost you about £3-4 a month) it is a piece of cake to install the wordpress software to start your blog, a nice theme and get used to using the software to blog. Also the advantage of being on your own domain and site is you are in complete control, which you don't get with blogger, Tumblr or the wordpress version of wordpress (does that make sense? It does to me..erm rather than blogging via the wordpress site you have your own but use their software..that's better) is that you can add advertisements. If you get a lot of traffic and get a lot of readers/comments and a good reputation and following then there is some serious money to be made.  My friend actually does it for a living and she does very well.

Some essential plug ins are Aksimet, Yoest SEO, Jetpack, Next Gen Gallery and Next Gen graphs, database optimization and W3 Super Cache (but that's a pain for a complete novice). The rest are just what you fancy really. My site is written using wordpress (think you've probably looked at it) and I use it to build sites for customers as it's probably the best way of content management (although, ironically, it wasn't started to be a CMS, it was supposed to be just for blogging).

Link your wordpress account to your site via wordpress and it's the same as blogging on there, i.e. You still get listed under the subjects if you have submitted your blog to them after you have published it on your own site.

Jetpack will let you publish everything to the social media. Google+ was a pain and I had to add a separate plug in but I noticed Jetpack has been updated a few times recently so I imagine that it's probably one of the share options now.

I prefer wordpress over blogger.