query to the brain trust

[cellio]

My congregation has a writing group and we'd like to be able to share some of our work with each other and anyone else who cares. Our own web site doesn't yet support blogging; I'm told it's coming but not soon. So I want to set up a shared blog or journal somewhere, with posting access restricted to the members and commenting open to everyone. I'm looking for suggestions about where to do this.

Some factors to consider:

• Most group members are minimally proficient with internet tools and concepts; I'm the outlier. So the interface needs to be pretty simple and resilient.
• There will be 10-15 individuals posting to this and I'd like it to be clear who's posting. (I don't want to share one account.)
• There's no money for this. I'm willing to chip in up to about $50 a year, but I can't fund individual accounts for each poster.
• If the site is ad-supported it should be tasteful; I've seen LJ ads recently (when accidentally logged out) and that's just plain obnoxious.
• For this application I don't think threaded comments are a requirement. (I consider them essential for my own journal, but not for this.)
• Syndication (RSS or Atom) is a must, but I assume they all do that. (More specifically, I want to be able to read this blog via LJ.)
• I have a personal aversion to Blogspot because it's very hard for me to post comments there. (OpenID seems to be broken and their captchas are extremely difficult for me.)

I find myself leaning toward Dreamwidth because of the ad-free familiar interface, but I don't know if asking people to create individual accounts would be too much of a burden. Can I have accounts set up there with just names and email addresses and an empty shell of a profile? (Can I do that and just hand out login ID/password pairs to the group members?) And there may well be something much better for this project; I didn't so much shop for a blogging platform as stumble into LJ because of friends. I haven't used the others to publish, only to comment.

Thoughts?

Comments

[siderea]

Can I do that and just hand out login ID/password pairs to the group members?

I don't think so. They're going to need to use their own email accounts to sign up.

I don't think creating accounts is too burdensome, but I may be misremembering.

There's no money for this. I'm willing to chip in up to about $50 a year, but I can't fund individual accounts for each poster.

I think DW is still on the invite code system, however, there was an offer for groups migrating to DW, where they'd provision an entire community with invites. Dunno if they're still doing that.

So I want to set up a shared blog or journal somewhere, with posting access restricted to the members and commenting open to everyone.

Wordpress.com may also meet your needs. More blog-ish. The posting user interface is very powerful, very complex, and very slick. But it may be more than you want your users to have to deal with.