What Features are Needed on a Blog Site?

In his 2011 book, Joomla! 1.6: A User’s Guide – Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website, Barrie North describes the features needed on a blog site.  I looked at each feature to see how it was implemented on THIS site, my 2015 WordPress practice website.

Flexible layout: defined by your WordPress Theme – make yours stand out a little
— Theme Twenty Fifteen is active, I chose the customize tab to set colors, header image, and choose latest posts for my front page.

Browser-based editing:
— From dashboard -> Posts

Automated publishing: instead of FTP, click a button
— yes, click the Update or Publish button to update or publish my post

Categories: split your post into categories that will make them easier to find
— From the right-hand side of editing a post, add a category for your blog post and assign your post to this category. I created a category “Blogging” and assigned my post to it.

— where do “Tags” fit in? I created a tag “Blogging” and assigned it to my post.

Search Engine Optimized URL’s: have a URL that includes keywords about your post
— I see that my post’s URL automatically ends with my post’s title words dash-separated

Comment systems: the number one way your site becomes “sticky”
— “Leave a Reply” is turned on by default
— why do I care about the commentor’s website?
— How to moderate comments? It looks like comments await moderation by default.

WordPress blog site home page
My WP practice site’s home page. I right-aligned this automatically captioned image by changing “align” from “alignnone” to “alignright”

Syndication Feeds: Push your post onto other RSS readers, have your posts appear automatically on someone else’s website
— by default there’a an “Entries RSS” in my blog’s “META” menu. Clicking on it leads to a page “Subscribe to this feed using ‘Live Bookmarks.’ ” It created a link within my browser bookmarks. Looks nice: gives website title, subtitle, linked titles to each blog post, date of post and the post itself.
— actually, the bookmark turns into a folder of links to posts. I’d rather use the feed URL, which is http://wp.elizapro.com/feed/

Email notification: Notify a mailing list when you’ve added a post, for marketing purposes
— How?

Search: your blog archive will soon be bursting. Provide a search capability to help site visitors find your blog posts; note some people prefer to browse
— I see the search box is built in

TrackBack:
TrackBacks are complex, but the bottom line is that you read a post, and you comment about it on your blog. You place the URL to the post in yours, and the blog picks up your post and leaves it as a comment in the other’s post.

I practiced the trackback technique via this post.

— It sounds like a trackback is a way to get someone else to link to your blog. I presume trackback posts can be moderated.


 

What do you think?  Since 2011, have any of these features become obsolete?  Are there NEW features that you consider essential to a blog?

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