Ten things I know…

This site is powered by WordPress, which is probably the most popular blogging software in the world. I’m feeling magnanimous, so I am going to skip my usual long-winded, useless wall of text introduction and get right to the meat of this issue.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About WordPress Blogging Software, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
WordPress Blogging Software

• 10: It’s “WordPress.”
  WordPress… Say it, let it roll of your tongue. It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? WordPress… It’s elegant, like a beautiful woman in a cocktail dress, one who is not pulling underwear out of her butt crack or wiping her nose on her sleeve. Please respect the beautiful woman that is WordPress; please do not refer to her as Word Press, wordspress, word press, or Werd Prezz. WordPress… Two proud, independent words melded to form the perfect compound word, a word of grace and charm, a word with with perfect curvature and capitalization, a word that says, “Write on me, big boy, I like it that way.”
• 9: You must have a hosting account of your own to use WordPress.
  WordPress is written in PHP, a programming language intended for web applications. In order to use WordPress, you must have somewhere to store your WordPress files as well as the proper software (a PHP interpretor) to execute them, and web server software to serve them to your readers. In addition to all this, you need a domain name that points at your server so people can find your site on the internet. This is not as complicated as it sounds, and any decent hosting company can get you set up in a matter of minutes. However, there are alternatives. There are sites out there that provide you with hosting for your blog, the software to write the blog and a URL for people to be able to reach your blog on the internet. Those services come with strings attached, though, (often some form of ads on your site), and lack the customization and control you get from hosting your own blog.
• 8: WordPress comes from WordPress.org, not WordPress.com.
  Ah, you poor, innocent fool. You’ve been to WordPress.com and now you’re confused, disheartened, and, yes, even a little angry. “Where’s the download link,” you cry, anguish in your heart. Well, my friend, I am here to tell you where the download link is: it’s at WordPress.org. WordPress.org is the home of this wonderful blogging software, WordPress.com is a site that hosts blogs on their servers, as discussed in #9.
• 7: WordPress has a large and friendly community.
  If you read my article on the Perl programming language, you know that I place some importance on user community when considering software. WordPress is wildly popular and has a great community of friendly and helpful people who are willing to give newcomers a hand. In addition, WordPress has bred a kind of fandom that has produced many blogs that are about blogging with WordPress, which means there is a wealth of information available for the reading. Whether you just need help with installing WordPress or you need to do something special with an existing installation, there is almost certainly a related WordPress how-to out there waiting for you to read it. Finally, the popularity and general tech-savviness of the WordPress community means a lot of available plugins just waiting to help you improve your blog (see #6).
• 6: The WordPress plugin architecture means you can do just about anything.
  Do you need a shopping cart? How about a affiliate link cloaker? Maybe you want to track your blog’s statistics, or make it easy for your readers to submit your articles to sites like Digg and Del.icio.us. Whatever extended functionality you want to add to your WordPress blog, you can probably find it in the WordPress plugin repository. This site is still fairly new, and I am already using a half dozen or more plugins to help me get exactly what I want out of this blog. The plugins are very easy to install and use, and the plugin method of extending functionality allows the core of the blogging software to remain streamlined and efficient.
• 5: It’s so easy, a monkey (or even you) can use it.
  WordPress strikes a delicate balance between being advanced technology and being easy to use. Yes, you can do all kinds of wonderful, fancy, amazing things with this blogging software, but you can also put t on your server and just start blogging. WordPress works great right out of the box and takes no special skills to set up and operate.
• 4: Once WordPress is installed, you can do everything through your browser.
  It’s great when software works smoothly with a minimum of low-level mucking around, and WordPress is great at that. The only time you’ll need to telnet/ssh/ftp to change your WordPress installation is when you want to add plugins, and even that is very simple. You don’t need to be a server administrator to make WordPress work for you.
• 3: It’s easy to make WordPress look pretty.
  This fits in with numbers five and six. A WordPress blog’s appearance is defined by templates, which are sort of like instructions that tell your blog how to look. There are literally thousands of pre-made templates available for use with this software. You can almost certainly find a color scheme and layout to fit your vision with just a little bit of searching and experimentation.
• 2: WordPress generates standards-compliant code.
  This might not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve ever surfed a site in two different browsers and noticed that the site looks great in one, and doesn’t work at all in the other, you know why this is important. The more standards-compliant your site it, the more compatible it is likely to be with a wide variety of browsers and feed readers. You want the blog to work properly for everyone, right? Otherwise, what’s the point of writing for an audience?
• 1: It’s Free, and Open Source to boot.
  Wait, did I forget to mention this? Hm, I guess I did. WordPress is completely free, as are all of the plugins I am using to extend this site’s functionality. WordPress is Open Source software, which has many benefits. For one thing, Open Source software tends to be very stable and very functional because it is developed as a community effort. The Open Source movement is one of the greatest things to happen to software and cooperative projects in general in my lifetime, and projects like WordPress help to drive the Open Source community.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under TTIK About.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.