Blogging for fun!

I’ve made fun of bloggers for years saying things like “Oh, I’m going to put that up on my blog” (where the “that” is some mundane minitute you find in life) but now that I have embraced blogging, it’s cool to do so don’t let the stigma of pocket-protecting, high-waisted-pants-wearing, living-in-their-parents’-basement, allegeric-to-light, four-eyed bloggers, keep you from joining the fun (btw, I’ve met two of those criteria in my life).

Blogging is a fun and easy way to keep folks up to date on what is going on with you or your family. I’ve maintained a personal family website since 1997 with photogalleries so that my mom (who lives an ocean away) and other friends and family can see what projects we’ve tackled, what crazy new hairstyle I’m sporting, whether I have a black eye or not, and basically keep them involved in our lives.

The only thing about maintinging a website is that it has required a fair amount of time and my wife (designer) and I (web programmer), who have about 19 years professional experience combined, and have spent even more time to create tools and templates to make our site even easier to publish. The normal (I’m definitely not normal) person would not want to take the time to do this and now you don’t need to.

[CUE TRUMPETS]

Blogging software, specifically WordPress, makes turning out a family (substitute your topic of interest here) website the easist thing in the world. WordPress comes with an admin interface that just blows me away a seasoned web veteran like myself (for those of guessing at home, the seasoning is a garlic rub and war I fought in was the Duke Nukem wars of 1993 – 1997…we lost some good men).

You can download free custom templates for your blog to make it look however you want…When you put the template in the right spot, it automatically comes up in a “Theme chooser”, you click the theme you want and the look of your blog has changed. That simple. For the more web geeky folks out there, you can edit the design to your heart’s content, and WP even has an interface for you to edit the raw PHP/CSS/HTML that is super easy to use.

With WordPress, you can choose how folks interact with your blog: you can allow anyone to post or comment without approval, send them to through the built in registration, allow you to change folks status and roles, etc…it is incredibly easy and cool. You and your users can be informed when folks respond to a post or you can can choose not to…there are too many options here to list.

When writing entries, users don’t need to know HTML to format their content with spacing, bolding, adding links, or images (uploaded images have thumbnails automatically created for them and are autolinked to the full size image). But if you want to tweak the HTML yourself to add divs or styles, you can do that too.

Another thing that makes WordPress so cool is that if the default install is lacking some functionality, it is a simple matter of going to google and typing “wordpress plugins xxxx” where xxxx is the the functionality you are looking for. You put the plugin in the proper directory, go to the Plugins tab in the admin, activate your plugin and boom, your new functionality is in place. People have written thousands of plugins (for free) to make WP even more powerful.

• Useful plugins
• Search for all plugins

Quick example, by default, WP doesn’t allow you to order your categories (it just sorts them alphabetically). I did a quick search, came up with “Category Order“, put the plugin in the right dir, activated it, and I immiediately had a new tab in WP that allowed me to order my categories so “Enjoy”,”Share”, etc…were at the top.

I guess what makes WordPress so cool (and in my opinion better than other blogging sofware) is that it allows the web novice to turn out a professional looking website with almost no web experience and with an intuitive / easy to use interface. But it ALSO allows the webgeeks to go in and totally customize the look, feel, and functionality of the site if they want…and do it in an easy and totally logical way. My wife and I have both been super impressed and said numerous times while setting up our site “WordPress rules”. Carlin even wants to redo our personal site using WordPress now.

At this point, I feel like I need to state that I get absolutely no money for endorsing WordPress…this post reads like an advertisment but it’s only because the sofware seriously rules. If you want to use something else like Blogger, blogspot, TypePad, go for it! I just think WordPress rules!

That last cool thing about WordPress: it’s free and they even will host your site for you. The one thing that sucks and is the reason our site in not on the offical WordPress site is that they don’t allow advertising…so if you want to run ads and try to make some money off your blog as well, they check out my “Blogging for donuts or dollars” post.

• WordPress
• Getting started with WordPress