Blogging gives regular, non-technical Internet users the ability to publish content on the World Wide Web quickly and easily. As a result, blogging became very popular very quickly, to the point that it is now considered mainstream. In some circles, blogging is even considered passe, as it has given way to publishing all total types of content freely and easily with WordPress. Regular Internet users are blogging, and Fortune 500 businesses, news organizations, and educational institutions are using WordPress to publish content on the Web. Today, 30 percent of all sites on the Web have WordPress behind them.
Although you can choose from a number of software platforms to publish Web content, for many content publishers, WordPress has the best combination of options. WordPress is unique in that it offers a wide variety of ways to run your website. WordPress successfully emerged as a preferred blogging platform and expanded into a full-featured content management system (CMS) that includes all the tools and features you need to publish a complete website on your own without a lot of technical expertise or understanding. In this chapter, I provide you with such content basics as publishing and archiving content, interacting with readers through comments, and ways for readers to access your content through social media syndication (RSS technologies). This article also helps you sort out the differences between a blog and a website, and explains how WordPress, as a CMS, can help you create a complete website. Finally, I show you some websites you can build with the WordPress platform.
Exploring Blogging
A blog is a great tool for publishing your diary of thoughts and ideas. A blog also serves as an excellent tool for business, editorial journalism, news, and entertainment. Here are some ways people use blogs:
» Personal: You’re considered a personal blogger if you use your blog primarily to discuss topics related to yourself or your life: your family, your cats, your children, or your interests (such as technology, politics, sports, art, or photography). My business partner, Brad Williams, maintains a personal blog.
» Business: Blogs are very effective tools for promotion and marketing, and business blogs typically provide useful information to readers and consumers, such as sales events and product reviews. Business blogs let readers provide feedback and ideas, which can help a company improve its services. A good example of a business blog is on the Discovery Channel site at https://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-newsroom/.
» Media/Journalism: Popular news outlets such as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are using blogs on their websites to provide information about current events, politics, and news on the regional, national, and international levels. Variety magazine has its entire website hosted on WordPress at https://verysions.com.
» Government: Governments use blogs to post news and updates quickly and integrate social media tools as a means of interacting with their citizens and representatives. In the United States, the White House is using WordPress to power its official website at https://whitehouse.gov, where the executive branch of the government provides policy statements and updates on the economy, national security, budget, immigration, and other topics.
» Citizen Journalism: Citizens are using blogs with the intent to hold the media and politicians in check by fact-checking news stories and exposing inconsistencies. Major cable news programs interview many of these bloggers as mainstream media recognizes the importance of the citizen voice that emerges through blogs. An example of citizen journalism is Power Line at https://www.powerlineblog.com.
» Professional: Professional blogs typically generate revenue and provide a source of monetary income for the owner through avenues such as advertising or paid membership subscriptions. Check out Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog at https://www.problogger.net. Rowse is considered the grandfather of professional blogging
The websites and blogs I provide in this list run on the WordPress platform. Many types of organizations and individuals choose WordPress to run their blogs and websites because of its popularity, ease of use, and large and active development community.
Understanding WordPress Technologies
The WordPress software is a personal publishing system that uses a PHPand-MYSQL platform, which provides everything you need to create your blog and dynamically publish your content without having to program the pages yourself. In short, with this platform, all of your content is stored in a MySQL database in your hosting account.
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 connecting, accessing, and processing data in a database. If this all sounds like Greek to you, think of MySQL as a large filing cabinet where all of the content on your website is stored. Keep in mind that PHP and MySQL are technologies that the WordPress software is built on, but that doesn’t mean you need experience in these languages to use it. Anyone with any level of experience can use WordPress without knowing anything about PHP or MySQL. Every time a visitor visits your website to read your content, he or she makes a request that is sent to your server. The PHP programming language receives that request, gets the requested information from the MySQL database, and then presents the requested information to your visitor through his or her web browser.
Archiving Your Publishing History
Content, as it applies to data stored in the MySQL database, refers to your websites posts, pages, comments, and options that you set in the WordPress dashboard or the WordPress software’s control/administration panel, where you manage your site settings and content. WordPress maintains chronological and categorized archives of its publishing history. This archiving process occurs with every post you publish on your blog. WordPress uses PHP and MySQL technology to archive what you publish so that you and your readers can access information such as date, category, author, tags, and so on. When you publish content on your WordPress site, you can file a post in any category you specify; a nifty archiving system allows you and your readers to find posts in specific categories. For example, the Archives page of my business partner’s blog (http://strangework.com/archives) has a Categories section, where you find a list of categories he created for his blog posts. Clicking the Blog Updates link below the Categories takes you to a list of posts on that topic.
WordPress lets you create as many categories as you want for filing your content. Some sites have just one category, and others have as many as 1,800 categories. WordPress is all about personal preference when it comes to organizing your content. On the other hand, using WordPress categories is your choice. You don’t have to use the category feature if you don’t. When you look for a hosting service, keep an eye out for a host that offers daily backups of your site so that your content isn’t lost if the hard drive fails or someone makes a silly mistake. Web hosting providers that offer daily backups as part of their services can save the day by restoring your site to a previous form. The theme (theme) you choose for your site—whether it’s the default theme, one you create, or one you custom-design—is not part of the content. Those files are part of the file system and are not stored in the database. Therefore, it’s a good idea to create backups of any theme files you use.
Interacting with Your Readers Through Comments
An exciting aspect of publishing content with WordPress is receiving feedback from your readers after it’s published on your site. Receiving feedback, or comments, is similar to having a guestbook on your site. People can leave notes for you about content that you publish on your site, and you can respond and engage your readers in conversation. These notes can expand on the ideas and thoughts you present in your content by giving your readers the opportunity to add their two cents’ worth.
The WordPress dashboard gives you full administrative control over who can leave comments. Additionally, if someone leaves a comment with questionable content, you can edit the comment or delete it. You are also free to not allow comments on your site.
Feeding Your Readers
RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are a standard feature that blog readers have come to expect. So what is RSS, exactly? RSS is written to a web server in XML (Extensible Markup Language) as a small, compact file that can be read by RSS readers). Think of an RSS feed as a syndicated, or deliverable, autocomplete “what’s new” list for your website.
Tools such as feed readers and email newsletter services can use RSS feeds from your website to consume data and aggregate it into a syndicated list of content published on your website. Website owners publish RSS feeds to allow these tools to consume and then distribute the data in an effort to expand the reach of their publications. To keep your readers up to date with the latest and greatest content you post, they can subscribe to your RSS feed. WordPress RSS feeds are autodiscovered by various feed readers. The reader only needs to enter your site’s URL, and the program automatically finds your RSS feed. WordPress has RSS feeds in several formats. Because the feeds are built into the software platform, you don’t need to do anything to provide your readers with an RSS feed of your content.
Trackbacks
The best way to understand trackbacks is to think of them as comments, except for one thing: trackbacks are comments made on your site by other sites, not people. Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, why wouldn’t inanimate objects want to participate in your discussion? Actually, maybe it’s not so crazy after all. A trackback is when you create a post on your site, and within the content of that post, you provide a link to a post created by another author on a different site. When you publish that post, your site sends a sort of electronic memo to the site you linked to. That site receives the memo and posts an acknowledgement of receipt as a comment to the post you linked to on the site. The information contained within the trackback includes a link to the post on your site that includes a link to the other site – as well as a short excerpt of your post along with the date and time. Trackbacks are displayed within the comments section of individual posts. The memo is sent via a network ping (a tool used to test, or verify, whether you are reachable on the Internet) from your site to the site you link to. This process works as long as both sites support the trackback protocol. Nearly all major CMSEs support the trackback protocol. Sending a trackback to a site is a nice way to let the author know that you like the information presented in their post. Most authors appreciate trackbacks to their posts from other content publishers.
Dealing with Comment and Trackback Spam
The absolute bane of publishing content on the Internet is comment and trackback spam. Ugh. When blogging became the “it” thing on the Internet, spammers saw an opportunity. If you’ve ever received spam in your email program, you know what I mean. For content publishers, the concept is same/ similar and just as frustrating. Spammers fill some content with open comments with their links, but not with any relevant conversation or interaction in the comments. The reason for this is very simple: websites receive higher rankings in the major search engines if they have many types of incoming links from other sites, such as trackbacks. Enter software like WordPress, with comment and trackback technologies, and these sites become prime breeding grounds for millions of spammers.
Because comments and trackbacks are published publicly on your site – and usually with a link to the commenter’s website – spammers get their site links posted on millions of sites by creating programs that automatically seek out websites with open comment systems and then hammer those systems with programs that contain links to their sites. Nobody likes spam. So, the developers of CMSEs like WordPress try to stop these spammers in their tracks, and for the most part, they’ve been successful. Sometimes, though, spammers sneak through. Many spammers are aggressive, and they’re all the more frustrating because they don’t contribute to the conversations that take place on the websites where they publish their spam comments. All WordPress systems have one important thing in common: Akismet, which beats spam dead. Akismet is a WordPress plugin brought to you by Automattic, the creator of the WordPress.com service.
Using WordPress as a Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) is a platform that lets you run a complete website on your own domain. This means that WordPress enables you to create and publish all kinds of content on your site, including pages, blog posts, e-commerce pages for selling products, videos, audio files, events, and more. A blog is a chronological display of content – most often, written by a blog author. Posts are published and, usually, categorized into topics and archived by date. Blog posts may have comments active so readers can leave their feedback and authors can respond, creating a dialogue about the blog post. A website is a collection of published pages with different sections that provide different experiences to the visitor. A website may include a blog, but usually has other sections and features. These other features include
»Photo galleries: albums of photos uploaded and collected in a specific area so visitors can browse and comment on them
»Ecommerce stores: fully integrated shopping areas in which you can upload products for sale and from which your visitors can purchase them
»Discussion forums: where visitors can join, create discussion threads, and respond to each other in specific threads of conversation
»Social communities: where visitors can become members, create profiles, become friends with other members, create groups, and collect community activity
»Portfolios: sections where photographers, artists, or web designers display their work
»Feedback forms: contact forms that your visitors fill out with information that then gets emailed directly to you
»Static pages (such as bio, FAQ, or services): pages that don’t change as frequently as blog pages, which update every time you publish a new post While the preceding list is by no means exhaustive; it is a list of some of the most common website sections.
My business website at https://webdevstudios.com also uses WordPress. This full site includes a static front page of information that serves as a portal to the rest of the site, on which you can find a blog; a portfolio of work; a contact form; and various landing pages, including services pages that outline information about the various services we provide (https://webdevstudios.com/services).
Using WordPress as a CMS means you are creating more than just a blog; you are creating an entire website that provides different experiences for your visitors.
Read Also:
- Top 10 WordPress Security Tips
- WordPress Widgets
- How To Use WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Frameworks
- How To Install A WordPress Theme
- How To Create WordPress Posts And Pages
- IntroducingThe WordPress Admin Panel (Dashboard)
- How To Install WordPress
- Things You Will Need To Build A WordPress Website
- Something About WordPress
- Why Start Blogging With WordPress
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