Chapter 2

WordPress Blogging Basics

In This Chapter

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 website function. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to worry about what’s happening on the back end 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.

This Crazy Little Thing Called Blog

Blogging is an evolutionary process, and blogs have evolved beyond personal journals. Undoubtedly, 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 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 blog, which you can find at http://lisasabin-wilson.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, products on the Internet, or both. Blogs are very effective tools for promotion and marketing, and business blogs usually offer helpful information to readers and consumers, such as 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.com service at http://serverbeach.wordpress.com.
• Media/journalism: More and more popular news outlets, such as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, have added blogs to their websites to provide information on current events, politics, and news on regional, national, and international levels. These news organizations often have editorial bloggers as well. Editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle, for example, maintains a blog on MSNBC’s website at http://blog.cagle.com/author/cagle, 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 www.powerlineblog.com.

• Professional: This category of blogger is growing every day. Professional bloggers are paid to blog for individual companies or websites. Blog networks, such as Scientific American (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com), have a full network of staff blogs. 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 (at blogging) has become common these days. If you’re interested in this type of blogging, check out Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog at http://problogger.net. Darren is considered the grandfather of all professional bloggers.

Dipping into Blog Technologies

The WordPress software is a personal publishing system that uses a PHP and MySQL platform. This platform provides 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.

PHP (which stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor — and PHP itself originally stood for personal home page, as named by its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf) 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 all that sounds like Greek to you, just think of MySQL as a big filing cabinet in which 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 on 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 — 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 create and keep a backup of any theme files that you’re using. See Part IV for further information on WordPress theme management.

When you look for a hosting service, choose one that provides 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. You can find more information on choosing a hosting provider in Chapter 6.

Archiving your publishing history

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 or posts that you’ve placed within a specific category. The Archives page on my personal blog (see it at http://lisasabin-wilson.com/archives) contains an Archives by Subject section, where you find a list of categories I’ve created for my blog posts. Clicking a link below the Archives by Subject heading takes you to a listing of posts that I wrote on that topic. See Figure 2-1.

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 preferences and options for organizing your content. On the other hand, using WordPress categories is your choice. You don’t have to use the category feature.

Interacting with your readers through comments

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 Figures 2-2 and 2-3 for examples. 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.

On 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. Chapter 7 has the information you need about setting up your preferences for comments on your blog.

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, though. Allowing comments on your blog invites your audience members to actively involve themselves in your blog by creating a discussion and dialog 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.

Feeding your readers

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a standard feature that blog readers have come to expect. 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 feed readers to download your feed — that is, their feed readers automatically discover new content (such as posts and comments) from your blog. Readers can then 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

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: that is, the blog reader needs to enter only your site’s URL, and the program will automatically find your RSS feed.

Most browser systems today alert visitors to the RSS feed on your site by displaying the universally recognized orange RSS feed icon, shown in the margin.

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.

Tracking back

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. Chapter 13 gives you information on how to use HTML to create links on your blog.

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. All bloggers appreciate the receipt of trackbacks to their posts from other bloggers.

Dealing with comment and trackback spam

Ugh. The absolute bane of every blogger’s existence is comment and trackback spam. When blogging became the “it” thing on the Internet, spammers saw an opportunity. Think of the e-mail spam you’ve received — comment and trackback spam 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: Websites 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’ websites — spammers get their site links posted on millions of blogs by creating programs that automatically seek websites with commenting systems and then hammering 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.

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 makers of WordPress.com.

Using WordPress as a Content Management System

You hear something like the following a lot if you browse different websites that publish articles about WordPress: “WordPress is more than a blogging platform; it’s a full content management system.” A content management system (CMS) is a platform that gives you the capability to run a full website on your domain. This means that in addition to hosting a blog, you can build pages and have additional features built into your website that have nothing to do with the content on your blog.

Exploring the difference between a website and a blog

A website and a blog are really two different things. Although a website can contain a blog, a blog doesn’t and can’t contain a full website. I know it sounds confusing, but after you read this section and explore the difference between the two, you’ll have a better understanding.

A blog is a chronological display of content, most often posts or articles written by the blog author. Those posts (or articles) are published and, usually, categorized into topics and archived by date. Blog posts can have comments activated, which means that readers of a blog post can leave their feedback and the blog post author can respond, thereby creating an ongoing dialog between author and reader about the blog post.

A website is a collection of published pages and sections that offer the visitor a variety of experiences or information. Part of the website can be a blog that enhances the overall visitor experience, but it usually includes other sections and features that might include things such as the following:

• Photo Galleries: This specific area of your website houses albums and galleries of uploaded photos, allowing your visitors to browse through and comment on the photos you display.
• E-Commerce Store: This feature is a fully integrated shopping cart through which you can upload products for sale, and your visitors can purchase your products via your online store.
• Discussion Forums: This area of your website allows visitors to join, create discussion threads, and respond back and forth to one another in specific threads of conversation.
• Social Community: This section of your website allows visitors to become members, create profiles, become friends with other members, create groups, and aggregate community activity.
• Portfolio of Work: If you’re a photographer or web designer, for example, you can display your work in a specific section of your site.
• Feedback Forms: You can have a page on your website with a contact form that visitors can fill out to contact you via e-mail.
• Static pages (such as a Bio, FAQ, or Services page): These pages don’t change as often as a blog page does. Blog pages change each time you publish a new post. Static pages contain content that doesn’t change very often.

The preceding list doesn’t exhaust what a full website can contain, but instead lists some of the most often seen sections of a website. On the companion website (www.dummies.com/extras/wordpress) for this book, I provide you with a showcase listing of ten websites that use WordPress as a CMS effectively.

Viewing examples: Blog versus website

I include a couple of figures in this section to further illustrate the difference between a blog and a website. Figure 2-4 shows the front page of my personal blog located at http://lisasabin-wilson.com. Notice that the site displays a chronological listing of the most recent blog posts I’ve made. On my personal site, I use WordPress primarily as a blogging tool.

In contrast, my business website, located at http://webdevstudios.com, uses WordPress as a CMS to publish a full website. This site includes a static front page of information that acts as a portal into the rest of the site, where you find a blog, a portfolio of work, a contact form, an order form, and various static pages used to tell my visitors more about the business. The static pages include services, FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and more.

Check out Figure 2-5 for a look at the front page of my business site at WebDevStudios and notice how it’s quite different from my personal blog site, shown in Figure 2-4.

Using WordPress as a CMS means that you’re using it to create not just a blog but an entire website full of sections and features that offer a different experience for your visitors.

Moving On to the Business of Blogging

Before getting started with blogging, you need to take a long look at your big plans for your website. 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 expect 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 want to blog about your services and the current news within your industry.

Having an idea of your subject matter helps 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, in much the same way as most people like to keep a distinct line of separation between their personal and professional lives, no matter what industry they 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.