Considering blog types
Finding out what blog technology can do for you
Outlining your initial blog plan
A lot happens behind the scenes to make your WordPress blog or Web site function. The beauty of it is this: You don't have to worry about what's happening on the back end in order to manage and maintain a WordPress site — unless you really want to. In this chapter, I delve a little bit into the technology behind the WordPress platform, including a brief look at PHP and MySQL, two software components required to run WordPress.
This chapter also covers some of the various blogging technologies that help you on your way to running a successful blog, such as the use of comments and RSS feed technology, as well as information about combating spam.
Blogging is an evolutionary process, and I have a strong feeling that blogs have evolved beyond personal journals to become tools for real journalism, business, and authorship.
A blog is a fabulous tool for publishing your personal diary of thoughts and ideas; however, blogs also serve as excellent tools for business, editorial journalism, news, and entertainment. Here are some ways that people use blogs:
Personal: This type of blogger creates a blog as a personal journal or diary. You're considered to be a personal blogger if you use your blog mainly to discuss topics that are personal to you or your life — your family, your cats, your children, or your interests (for example, technology, politics, sports, art, or photography). My own blog, which you'll find at
http://justagirlintheworld.com, is an example of a personal blog.Business: This type of blogger uses the power of blogs to promote a company's business services and/or products on the Internet. Blogs are very effective tools for promotion and marketing, and business blogs usually offer helpful information to readers and consumers, such as ad tips and product reviews. Business blogs also let readers provide feedback and ideas, which can help a company improve its services. ServerBeach is a good example of a business that keeps a blog on the hosted
WordPress.comservice athttp://serverbeach.wordpress.com.Media/journalism: More and more popular news outlets such as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are adding blogs to their Web sites to provide information on current events, politics, and news on a regional, national, and international level. These news organizations often have editorial bloggers as well. Editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle, for example, maintains a blog on MSNBC's Web site at
http://cagle.msnbc.com/news/blog, where he discusses his cartoons and the feedback he receives from readers.Citizen journalism: The emergence of citizen journalism coincided with the swing from old media to new media. In old media, the journalists and news organizations direct the conversation about news topics.
With the popularity of blogs and the millions of bloggers who exploded onto the Internet, old media felt a change in the wind. Average citizens, using the power of their voices on blogs, changed the direction of the conversation. Citizen journalists often fact-check traditional media news stories and expose inconsistencies, with the intention of keeping the media or local politicians in check. An example of citizen journalism is the Power Line Blog at
http://powerlineblog.com.Professional: This category of blogger is growing every day. Professional bloggers are paid to blog for individual companies or Web sites. Blog networks, such as
WeblogsInc.com, hire bloggers to write on certain topics of interest. Also, several services match advertisers with bloggers, so that the advertisers pay bloggers to make blog posts about their products. Is it possible to make money as a blogger? Yes, and making money is becoming common these days. If you're interested in this type of blogging, check out Darren Rowse's ProBlogger blog athttp://problogger.net. Darren is considered to be the grandfather of all professional bloggers.
The WordPress software is a personal publishing system that uses a PHP-and-MySQL platform, which provides you everything you need to create your own blog and publish your own content dynamically, without having to know how to program those pages yourself. In short, all your content is stored in a MySQL database in your hosting account.
Note
PHP (which stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. When a visitor opens a page built in PHP, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor's browser. MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. If that all sounds like Greek to you, just think of MySQL as a big filing cabinet where all the content on your blog is stored.
Every time a visitor goes to your blog to read your content, he makes a request that's sent to a host server. The PHP programming language receives that request, obtains the requested information from the MySQL database, and then presents the requested information to your visitor through his Web browser.
In using the term content as it applies to the data that's stored in the MySQL database, I'm referring to your blog posts, comments, and options that you set up in the WordPress Dashboard. The theme (design) you choose to use for your blog — whether it's the default theme, one you create for yourself, or one that you have custom-designed for you — isn't part of the content in this case. Those files are part of the file system and aren't stored in the database. So it's a good idea to create and keep a backup of any theme files that you're currently using. See Part IV for further information on WordPress theme management.
Tip
When you look for a hosting service, keep an eye out for the hosts that provide daily backups of your site, so that your content/data won't be lost in case something happens. Web hosting providers that offer daily backups as part of their services can save the day by restoring your site to its original form.
Packaged within the WordPress software is the capability to maintain chronological and categorized archives of your publishing history, automatically. WordPress uses PHP and MySQL technology to sort and organize everything you publish in an order that you, and your readers, can access by date and category. This archiving process is done automatically with every post you publish to your blog.
When you create a post on your WordPress blog, you can file that post under a category that you specify. This feature makes for a very nifty archiving system in which you and your readers can find articles/posts that you've placed within a specific category. The archives page on my personal blog (see it at http://justagirlintheworld.com/archives) contains a Topical Archive Pages section, where you find a list of categories I've created for my blog posts. Clicking the Blog Design link below the Topical archive pages heading takes you to a listing of posts that I wrote on that topic (see Figure 2-1 and Figure 2-2).
WordPress lets you create as many categories as you want for filing your blog posts by topic. I've seen blogs that have just one category and blogs that have up to 1,800 categories — WordPress is all about personal preference and how you want to organize your content. On the other hand, using WordPress categories is your choice. You don't have to use the category feature if you'd rather not.
One of the most exciting and fun aspects of blogging with WordPress is getting feedback from your readers the moment you make a post to your blog. Feedback, referred to as blog comments, is akin to having a guestbook on your blog. People can leave notes for you that are published to your site, and you can respond and engage your readers in conversation about the topic at hand (see Figure 2-3 and Figure 2-4). Having this function in your blog creates the opportunity to expand the thoughts and ideas that you presented in your blog post by giving your readers the opportunity to add their two cents' worth.
In the WordPress Dashboard, you have full administrative control over who can and can't leave comments. In addition, if someone leaves a comment with questionable content, you can edit the comment or delete it. You're also free to choose not to allow any comments on your blog.
Tip
Some blog users say that a blog without comments isn't a blog at all. This belief is common in the blogging community, because experiencing visitor feedback through the use of comments is part of what has made blogging so popular. It's a personal choice. Allowing comments on your blog invites your audience members to actively involve themselves in your blog by creating a discussion and dialogue about your content. By and large, readers find commenting to be a satisfying experience when they visit blogs, because comments make them part of the discussion.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a standard feature that blog readers have come to expect. So what is it, really?
The Introduction to RSS page on the resource site WebReference.com (www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/) defines RSS as "a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable 'What's New' for your site."
Readers can use tools called feed readers to download your feed — that is, their feed readers are set up to automatically discover new content (such as posts and comments) from your blog and download that content for their consumption. Table 2-1 lists some of the most popular feed readers on the market today.
Table 2-1. Popular RSS Feed Readers
Reader | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing to, and sharing RSS feeds. You have no software to download or install; Bloglines is all Web based. You need to sign up for an account to use this service. | |
Google Reader |
| This free online service is provided by Internet search giant Google. With Google Reader, you can keep up with your favorite blogs and Web sites that have syndicated (RSS) content. You have no software to download or install to use this service, but you need to sign up for an account with Google. |
| This is a free service that requires you to download the RSS reader application to your own computer. |
For your blog readers to stay updated with the latest and greatest content you post to your site, they need to subscribe to your RSS feed. Most blogging platforms allow the RSS feeds to be autodiscovered by the various feed readers — meaning that the reader needs only to enter your site's URL, and the program will automatically find your RSS feed.
WordPress has built-in RSS feeds in several formats. Because the feeds are built in to the software platform, you don't need to do anything to provide your readers an RSS feed of your content. Check out Chapter 8 to find out more about using RSS feeds within the WordPress program.
The best way to understand trackbacks is to think of them as comments, except for one thing: Trackbacks are comments that are left on your blog by other blogs, not by actual people. Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?Actually, it does.
A trackback happens when you make a post on your blog, and within that post, you provide a link to a post made by another blogger in a different blog. When you publish that post, your blog sends a sort of electronic memo to the blog you've linked to. That blog receives the memo and posts an acknowledgment of receipt in a comment to the post that you linked to.
That memo is sent via a network ping (a tool used to test, or verify, whether a link is reachable across the Internet) from your site to the site you link to. This process works as long as both blogs support trackback protocol.
Sending a trackback to a blog is a nice way of telling the blogger that you like the information she presented in her blog post. Every blogger appreciates the receipt of trackbacks to their posts from other bloggers.
Ugh. The absolute bane of every blogger's existence is comment and trackback spam. When blogs became the "It" things on the Internet, spammers saw an opportunity. If you've ever received spam e-mail, the concept is similar and just as frustrating.
Before blogs came onto the scene, you often saw spammers filling Internet guestbooks with their links but not leaving any relevant comments. The reason is simple: Web sites receive higher rankings in the major search engines if they have multiple links coming in from other sites. Enter blog software, with comment and trackback technologies — prime breeding ground for millions of spammers.
Because comments and trackbacks are published to your site publicly — and usually with a link to the commenters' Web sites — spammers got their site links posted on millions of blogs by creating programs that automatically seek Web sites with commenting systems and then hammer those systems with tons of comments that contain links back to their own sites.
No blogger likes spam. As a matter of fact, blogging services such as WordPress have spent untold hours in the name of stopping these spammers in their tracks, and for the most part, they've been successful. Every once in a while, however, spammers sneak through. Many spammers are offensive, and all of them are frustrating because they don't contribute to the ongoing conversations that occur in blogs.
All WordPress systems have one very major, very excellent thing in common: Akismet, which kills spam dead. Chapter 10 tells you more about Akismet, which is brought to you by Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com.
Before getting started with blogging, you need to take a long look at your big plans for your Web site. A word of advice: Organize your plan of attack before you start. Have a good idea of what types of information you want to publish, how you want to present and organize that information, and what types of services and interaction you want to provide your audience.
Ask this question out loud: "What am I going to blog about?" Go ahead — ask it. Do you have an answer? Maybe you do, and maybe not — either way, it's all right. There's no clear set of ground rules you must follow. Having an idea of what you're planning to write about in your blog makes planning your attack a little easier. You may want to write about your personal life. Maybe you plan to share only some of your photography and provide very little commentary to go along with it. Or maybe you're a business owner, and you want to blog about your services and current news within your industry.
Having an idea of your subject matter will help you determine how you want to deliver that information. My design blog, for example, is where I write about Web design projects, client case studies, and news related to design and blogging. You won't find pictures of my cats there, but you will find those pictures on my personal blog. I keep the two blogs separate, much in the same way that most of us like to keep a distinct line of separation between our personal and professional lives, no matter what industry we work in.
When you have your topic and plan of delivery in mind, you can move forward and adjust your blog settings to work with your plan.