WordPress Blog Software
For those of you do not know, which probably depends on how much of a technical inclination you have and how far back you have been reading the blog, but this blog runs on my own hosting solution with an installation of the WordPress blog software running on top of that. This particular setup is great, as it back ends to a basic MySQL database, sets on a very nice Linux host that I have a setup running several other sites on as well. WordPress itself is released under the open source, open license concept, which means as things are thought of they can be added and it is free to use the software, available at WordPress.org for download.
It is possible of course to sign up and run a WordPress based blog on the WordPress.com site, by simply signing up, and starting. It does have some limits on the customization options, but very few. It does limit you ability have a direct domain without paying for it and you are also limited in doing any advertising on the site yourself or at least you were when I investigated sometime ago. This is however, probably the quickest and easiest way to get started blogging outside of a site like MySpace which does have a limited blog type of software that works well with in the community, but is cumbersome at best for a non-MySpacer.
I have a couple of things that have come up recently in regards to WordPress that I feel the need to talk about. Actually, now that I think about it there are about five of them, if I can recall them all. Though some are more related to just blogs in general and are more universal than just WordPress itself. So I am sitting here listening the O-Brother Where Art Though very non-technical mostly old fashion music sound track I thought I would write about something fairly technical considering the general audience.
- Recently on the Weblog Tools Collection blog and indeed on the forums that are for communication and support issue regarding WordPress there has been a lot of complaint about some plugins that have ceased to function after recent updates. A lot of finger-pointing has gone toward the fact that WordPress re-releases the core on an almost seemingly monthly basis. I can attest that the major and consequent follow-up patch release have been an almost monthly process. This is not an issue if you are running on the wordpress.com solution, but on your own site, this has meant downloading, decompressing, de-activating plugins, copying files, updating the database, reactivating plugins, and so forth. Not exactly the kind of process for the faint of heart or non-technical person. Some of this has been addressed with a recent plugin to do automatic updates, though it is itself new and of course required installation – and at least my first attempt of using it did not re-activate my plugins despite indicating it did (not a big deal except I got a spam comment that I later deleted manually and my blog visit counts were off that day). Anyway, my suggestion to the folks do WordPress is keep the same general schema in place and do a few less releases. Do bug or patch updates as required by security/safety – but those are hardly a major release and are few in between that are likely to break a plugin. Four major releases a year is MORE then enough.
- Apparently I have been asleep at the wheel a bit. I thought the measure of success of the blog was number of unique daily visitors combined with those pulling an RSS feed. However, I am no reading from some of the experts that it is really the number of comments. So, to this I say I have apparently the most cohesive thoughts in the world and leave so little room for comment – that or I have just muddied the waters so much that none can make enough sense to leave a coherent comment. Regardless the point is, there are very few comments on my blog. They have increased lately, but the over all number is still very tiny in the great scheme of things. The big news here though is that there is now a plugin that is shows instead of possibly skewed unique visitor and such, instead the number of comments the blog has received. This is not something I plan to turn on anytime soon, but once my blog gets enough comments to make it seem worthwhile I may reconsider.
- A statistic I noticed the other day that struck me as just interesting – the number of unique views of various pages on this site is about 2/3 the number of spam that has been stopped by Askimet (the spam stopping plugin mechanism for WordPress). Granted I understand how spam comments can be robotized and even how a direct call can be made to the site page with that attempting comment (being one in the business has its advantageous sometimes). However, in my head I am still thinking that should have triggered a page “viewed” count. So maybe I am not into the business as far as I thought I was. This one is just an observation, but if someone has the answer let me know.
- Having recently set up blogs for the office in conjunction with the newspaper group that I work for, I have one major complaint/disappointment in regards to WordPress. There is no clear easy path to host multiple blogs on the same relative site without doing some hacks on a few little files. Further, even once done, each new blog you want to set up requires the additional setup of things down at directive level for Apache (the most common software that is the backend to make websites work). This is a place where WordPress is behind the curve given the easy, practical, and almost non-technical way that some of the competitors have used handled this same issue. So, for what is currently a test bed of about six blogs and soon to quickly grow probably in number to about forty is alas not going to be done using WordPress for this simple deficit (if you need such a solution yourself I would point you to B2Evolution as a possibility, though I do not think it is as rich as WordPress in all the options).
- Cloud Tags – I still think they are over used. I commented recently though about the global cloud tag and how I thought that would be kind of interesting. I have no, however, been able to find any information in regards to whether a site hosting stand alone can be linked into this global cloud tag. Granted I have only made a cursory inquiry at this point, so I do not suppose I can complain very much, eh?
- While I am at it – one of the recent versions did make inserting media, especially photos into a blog a LOT easier. Used to be you had to upload it manually, recall the exact location, point to it manually, and so forth. However, the new upload picture button has some limits on formatting and arrangement options. I have yet to get a tag line on the photo to look the way I would want them (centered for instance) on them. Also, I tried doing a video today. While I could do a link, I really wanted the video embedded. That is what I am off to try to figure out next though – what fun.
