Have you heard of Citizen Journalism Nepal? It’s a site modeled on OhMyNews of South Korea (that anybody can write news on it and get paid for).
CjNepal is also a free blog host that means anyone can register and start their own blogs as in the blogger.com or wordpress.com. The site has been around for quite a few time but there is not much blogs registered so far (probably because many have never heard of it or maybe because we have a tendency of not believing on something started by a Nepali).
The site uses WordPress MU (also used by WordPress.com and blogsome.com). For the blogger, it’s same as using WordPress. The best things with CjNepal are the selection of 47 templates for the site, no bandwidth or space limitations. Right now, the server has 140GB of space and the site is supported by Syracuse University (not financially).
How come the idea of starting a free blog host for Nepali? The founder Prameya Bhandari says: “I was seeing a lot of Nepalese starting blogs on third party website. However, as I see they seem to stop blogging after a while, probably due to lack of related traffic, as CjNepal is a Nepali website, it might help get better traffic, thus encouraging more people to write regularly.â€
He assures the site will have more templates and plugins in near future and promises to provide good support. Hopefully, he will think of using database backup plugin so that users can be assured their posts will be saved even if chose to go with new hosts.
Note:NepaliVoices has created a test blog at blogs.cjnepal.org/test and you can login with username test and password test if you want to go through the admin area for test purpose.
