Let’s get started right away.
Blogs have taken the Internet by storm. They started like simple diaries and have grown to be full-fledged CMSs now. If you want to start a blog, you have the following two options:
If you are a casual blogger, signing up with a hosted service is a suitable choice. But if you want full control of your blog, setting up your own system is the best option. It’s not very difficult—you could do it within five minutes.
We will cover only self-hosted solutions for this article. But you can easily apply this knowledge to a blog service.
WordPress (www.WordPress.org) is the most popular self-hosted blogging software. Hundreds of thousands of sites run on WordPress, and tens of millions of people see WordPress-driven content every day.
The following images are of the PlayStation ( http://blog.us.playstation.com/ ) and the People ( http://offtherack.people.com/ ) blog sites, which use WordPress:
Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) is another longtime favorite. It’s very easy to use and has a strong fan following.
There are many contenders after the top two blogging CMSs. All general-purpose CMSs have a blogging component. Many old blog software applications are no longer actively maintained. There are new entrants on the scene that focus on niches, such as photo blogging.
We can’t cover all of the blog software in this article. So, we will only cover WordPress at length. We will talk about Movable Type and ExpressionEngine briefly. At the end, we will touch upon other blogging software.
What we are interested in is to find out answers to the following questions:
Let’s try creating a site structure, adding and editing content, applying design templates, and making a few customizations with WordPress to see how it performs.
Click on that icon.
We published a new blog post with WordPress! This was the first time we used WordPress, but we could accomplish everything we needed to post this entry just from one screen.
This is an important thing. Many CMSs require that you set up categories and images separately. This means you have to know the system before you can use it! WordPress allows you to learn about the system while using it. All sections in the Add New Postpage are well-labeled. There are sufficient descriptions, and what is not needed is hidden by default.
WordPress looks easy and powerful so far. Let us look at how we can harness it further.
Surviving blog jargon and benefitting from it
Blogs have their own terminology. You may not have heard of trackbacks, pingbacks, tags, or permalinks. You can learn more about these terms from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blogging_terms and http://www.dailyblogtips.com/the-bloggers-glossary/. Similarly, there are excellent features that blogs have—comments, aggregating content from other sources, ability to get updates via RSS feeds, and so on. I recommend you to go through these glossaries to learn more about blogs.
Managing content with WordPress seems easy. We want to see how easy is it to customize its design and extend its features. Let’s begin with the action.
We installed a new design theme for our WordPress blog. We downloaded three themes from the Web, unzipped them, and uploaded them to our WordPress themes folder.
The themes showed up in WordPress admin. Clicking on a theme showed a live preview. This made our decision easy. We activated the theme we liked. That’s how easy it was to change the design of our blog!
If you recall, installing a new design was similar in Joomla!, except that Joomla! allowed us to upload a ZIP file using its administration interface itself. The tricky part in giving a new design to your site was shortlisting and selecting a design, not setting it up.
Consider the following theme editor in WordPress
If you want to further customize your theme, you can do that. In fact, you have full control over how your site looks with WordPress. You can use Appearance | Editor to change individual theme files.
We recommend making template customizations on a local installation of WordPress first.Once you get everything done according to your choice, you can upload the changed files to the theme’s folder and activate it.
Widgets are content blocks that can be used in a theme. Search, RSS feeds, Blog Post Archives, Tag Cloud, and Recent Posts are some of the built-in widgets available in WordPress. You can turn them on or off independently, determine their position in the sidebar, and also change their settings. Go to the Appearance | Widgets page to take over the control of WordPress widgets.
Our Yoga Site needs a lot more than just the core content management. How can we achieve that with WordPress? And will it be wise to use WordPress for our Yoga Site?
The WordPress plug-in architecture is solid. You will find hundreds of high-quality plug-ins from photo galleries to e-commerce. But remember that the core of WordPress is a blog engine, which chronologically displays content under set categories. It encourages sharing and contribution. Theoretically, you can customize WordPress to any need you have. But we recommend you to evaluate the most important features for your site and then decide whether you want to use WordPress as a base, or something else.
I use WordPress for my blog and have a range of plug-ins installed. WordPress is painless, and it allows me to focus on the core goal of my blog—sharing knowledge. Take a look at the list of plug-ins on my blog at www.mehtanirav.com.
You may have noticed a few plug-ins to handle comments and spam. Why would you need that? Well, because you will end up spending all your time removing spam comments from your system if you don’t have them activated.
Comment spam is a real pain with all blogs. Spammers have written spam-bots (automatic software) that keep posting junk comments on your blog. If you don’t protect comment submission, your blog will soon be flooded with advertisements of pills you don’t want to take and a lot of other things you don’t want your visitors to attend to.
Comment protection plug-ins are the first you should install. I use Akismet with Simple Math. Simple Math poses a simple mathematical question to the comment writer. A human can easily answer that. This takes care of most of the spam comments. Comments that pass through this test need to pass through Akismet. Askimet is an excellent spam-protection plug-in from the WordPress team. These two plug-ins kill almost 99.99% of spam comments on my blog.
Once I am left with legitimate comments, I can go to WordPress’s Admin | Comments, and Approve, Unapprove, Delete, or Mark as Spam all comments. The Edit Comments screen looks like the following screenshot:|
WordPress is a superb choice for creating a blog. It can be used as a general-purpose CMS as well. We have covered most of the day-to-day operations with WordPress so far. Here are some additional resources for you.
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