Links.net and Scripting.com were blogs before the term existed. And Movable Type, Greymatter, and numerous other blogging tools existed long before WordPress, which was relatively late to the game (and technically a fork of a prior project).

Nowadays, we also have more modern tools like Jekyll, Ghost or whatever for blogging.

Movable Type preceded WordPress by a couple of years or so, FWIW.

LiveJournal predated Movable Type by two years.

Finger's got them all beat by a few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

id Software used finger heavily during the 90s with regular .plan updates.

There's an archive of John Carmack's .plan files here:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

Static websites with blogs/regular entries predated even livejournal

This.

Blogging predates all blogging services, platforms, and software. Blogging was invented by early web pioneers. The corporations followed in the Gold Rush of the 1990s dot-com bubble, and they've been trying to monetize our social lives ever since.

Nowadays, thanks to marketing machines and television talking heads, nobody has "websites" anymore, we have "blogs".

I think I first blogged in the early 2000's with Blog Spot (which became Blogger). It was great.

But not the others:

1999 LiveJournal

1999 Blogger

2001 Movable Type

2003 WordPress

while not blog "software", one could say that the contents of an html directory exposed by, for example, http://weirdmachinehostname.university.edu/~username/ were the earliest blogs. Hand crafted HTML homepages and such.

Hmm nah, I remember “blogging” explicitly meant drafting and publishing posts directly from a website form, as opposed to crafting HTML documents and uploading them over FTP (which was what people did at the time and obviously complained about.)

The word "blog" appeared a few months before the infrastructure to draft and publish posts directly from a website form. And the concept of diaries/weblogs that it designated was a few years older.

B2/Cafelog (from where Mike/Matt forked to WordPress) was also 2001.

I dumped MT (due to my Perl-aversion) for B2 and then onto the WordPress fork when B@ founder Valdrighi stopped active development of it.

Whilst not an open blog platform, CmdrTaco of Slashdot claims his Slashdot prototype 'Chips and Dips' which he created in 1997, was one of the first 'blogs'.