Tag: Blogging

The Path to Blogging Success

Tips From my WordPress Book

Book cover: WordPress - the missing manual
WordPress – The Missing Manual, by Matthew MacDonald

A good post title clearly announces what you are going to discuss (p. 95)

Make sure your content is worth reading (p. 105) e.g. interesting or useful

Add new content regularly –“avoid stale content.”  But an observation, what’s wrong with that? — posts are dated.  Maybe it depends on the topic.

Keep your content organized.  “A good blog is ruthlessly arranged using categories and tags,” since browsing through monthly archives or searching for keywords in a post are not that convenient.

What IS a Blog?

### Creates H3

(this is a sticky post)

H4 Looks Like This

In his 2011 book, Joomla! 1.6: A User’s Guide – Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website, Barrie North describes “what is a blog?”  Here is my summary of his topic:

What IS a blog?
* communication medium: typically frequent brief posts about a particular subject
* unique communication style: honest first-person voice
frequent posting: daily? weekly?
* usually posts are brief, only introductory text is shown on the main page, along with a “read more link
* make regular posts to build a loyal readership that will have consistent expectations about your blog content

Carol’s comment: who has time to regularly read anyone’s blog? Even as much as I value Jacob Nielsen’s “Alert Box,” I only visit when I have time to read, and first I search through his recent topic lists to choose what to read. Or I read someone’s blog post when it turns up in Google search results.

Which platform? Barrie says pick one that’s extensible to other types of web pages. In 2011, when Barrie North published his book, WordPress was (probably?) not so extensible.  Hence Joomla was the choice.  Now (in 2015) WordPress has evolved into a more general website platform.

How to order posts?

Decentralizing Applications

Learning about TrackBacks: Barrie North writes: 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.

Let’s practice.  I believe this blog post constitutes a comment about another’s blog post.

As written by Chris Daft at http://riversonicsolutions.com/blog.html:

Adam B. Levine points out that Uber is an analog of Napster. Centralized services become targets for legal challenges.   Decentralized services “test a higher level of regulatory resistance.”

The specific blog post is here: http://riversonicsolutions.tumblr.com/post/123471804693/decentralizing-applications

I’d agree with this automatic commenting in another’s post, if the “other” could moderate such comments before they appeared.