Look back on the webcam. The novelty of watching someone else quickly wore-off. There was only one site that succeeded at retaining an audience, Jennycam — which disappeared when she graduated college. And for as much as I like Skype, how big is it? I first used it to interview with an agency. You’d imagine it would be a great way to connect with others.*

Social networks are wasting your time. How many months are you going to spend cell phoning your 140-characters to your Twitter account? Why do you think the things you do are of interest to anyone else? Seriously, I’m busy all day long but I see even my friends yawn when I tell them about it. So, I tried Twitter. Know how to cancel a Twitter account? I don’t.

* I think it’s not as popular as it might be because setting-up a webcam and dealing with Windows’ obnoxious sound configuration gets in the way. A computers isare enough work as it is.

Open source projects are a great way to exercise creativity. And they attract some of the brightest people. Then enthusiasts gather, associating themselves with the project. They know some HTML or CSS and become “designers” or know some SQL and PHP and become “developers.” The enthusiasm makes the enterprise fun but there’s a lack of “professionalism” encircling the project: a lot of cooks messin’ with the broth.

There’s a certain amount of pain you’re going to suffer if you stray too far off a marked path getting your blog going. What follows are my notes, in the hope that they help you.

Picking Your Blog

This really is essential. Before selecting WordPress (which you should), there are a lot of other frogs you can kiss, first. I hugged and kissed:

Admittedly, bblog, and a few others are not listed because their future seems dim, and there are numerous dead ends like sparkleblog. Oh, yes, and a friend who was using Movable Type (until switching to WordPress) walked me through that one. In the end, the best reason to choose WordPress is because it’s the most “stable” and “feature-rich,” it really is quite “robust” and “flexible,” it will “enable” and “empower” you. (hahahahah, I just love corporate language)

Three Paths

There are three installation possibilities. They’re only mentioned here in passing because this post would be way too long if it included a discussion on WordPress installation paths. (This is an important topic but we’ll come back to it at a future time.)

Light Installation The path of least resistance. You visit WordPress where you sign up for a free account. You can have a presentation that suits you with some personal features. You don’t have to give much time or thought to technical issues, you can just start blogging. (Throw yer arms in the air and yell, Whoo hoo.)

Medium Installation Fraught with potholes. Here you buy a domain name, and get yourself setup with a host. With some help from your host’s technical support, you create a database, get WordPress copied to your host’s server. You run the WordPress install file from your browser, and presto, you log in as administrator. Congratulations, you are ready to become an independent domain blogger — with all that entails. (This is the installation type we’re going to discuss herein.)

Heavy Duty Installation Lions and tiger and bears, oh my. This is all about setting-up a local Web server to test your blog and configure it before you start screwing-up the one you’ve gotten up and running on your host. If you want to be a WordPress wonk, you have to setup a local server but that’s not as easy as the PHP, MySql, and Windows IIS documentation would have it — especially if you drive a clunky Edsel … er, I mean Vista. (This installation is for those who also like being waterboarded.)

Pick Your Theme With Care

The safest place to get a theme referral is Weblog Tools Collection. Not perfect but not bad.

Knowing the reason you’ll blog will guide your choices in how your blog is presented — presentation is very important. When your landing page displays, it should immediately impress your reader with your mission. A blog about finance should evoke wealth management. A technology blog should evoke knowledge and trends. A personal blog of your writings, on the other hand, can evolve as you evolve.

A theme is not just a pretty face. It has internals that will facilitate or retard your desire to expand it’s capability, which is what we’ll explore first.

How many columns? That’s your first theme selection question. Ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of WordPress themes have a top, middle, and bottom. The middle can have one, two or three columns. Like so:

The narrower vertical columns are “sidebars.”

There is a recent trend to create more interesting patterns. There are a few good designs that emulate Web-magazine layouts, for example, and some blogs are designed with an eye for video-blogging and photo-blogging. But yours is going to be one of the ones illustrated above.

The choice of columns for the non-programmer, non-designer, is important because as you move along in your bloglife, some things are going to swell, like your sidebar lists. Look over most blogs and you see that nobody has just one category for their posts. You categories will grow. Your blogroll will grow. Your posts will grow. Your comments will grow. Get the picture? So, do you want one sidebar and you’ll figure-out how to accommodate growth or two sidebars? (That happened to this blog, and the blogroll now has its own page, thanks to a plugin.)

When evaluating a theme, look at what the theme offers you without too much addition on your part. The basics are:

• List of pages
• List of categories
• Archive list
• List of links (blogroll)
• An optional menu (made-up of your pages)
  or
  List of pages in sidebar
• An optional calender (of your posts)
• A functioning search box
• Looks nice to you.

(It’s a “functioning search box” because there’s this nice theme that I put effort into by adding some plugins, added some images, yada-yada-yada. Then I discovered that something was wrong with the search: it 404ed. I guess I could have figured out what was wrong and corrected it but the point is to have fun — maybe make money — blogging, not fixing.)

And that’s why it’s important to make a good choice the first time. No matter what you hear about the fun of SQL or PHP or theme design, that’s not why you’re in it; you’re in it to write. The less you have to meddle under the hood the better.

It should also be a readable theme. Go ahead and see how many return readers you accumulate with that cool black theme, with the gray text, with the red headings, with the blah-blah blah-blah blah-blahs that nobody can read no matter how hard they squint. Right. Later. Some time much later.

And, over time, you’ll customize the theme you select in little ways that accumulate. You’ll add a plugin and that possibly means you’ll add some code the plugin author gave you to show the results of the plugin. You’ll add some personal information to the footer like your copyright. It’s important to track how you customize your theme because, should you decide to use a different theme, you’ll probably want to replicate most, if not all, of your customizations.

Take note: Some innocent-looking themes will blow away your visual so be prepared to go under the hood of your Web site to delete the theme. These are usually older themes (older in relation to the WordPress version you’re using). In plainer english: You download a theme you like, then upload the theme files to your blog site. You logon to your Dashboard and use Design to select the theme, then your blog disappears — sometimes even your Administration page. (You fix this by opening your site and deleting the theme you uploaded. Refreshing your browser will return your blog to WordPress’ default theme.)

Take note: Many free themes are free but some are “free.” They contain undesirable (to you) code. For HTML, CSS, or Photoshop templates, they might contain Google advertising script that gives the author of the template a few click-thru nickels, and you can scan the template page(s) to find and delete the scripting. But WordPress themes are code. You’d have to be fairly hip to read the theme pages and spot what you prefer not to be there. Without going into boring soliloquy about it, read a post by 5thirtyone called, Do not download WordPress themes distributed by 3rd party sites.

Caveat: I have no idea why the Post/Page Update Notification (a.k.a punmail) plugin runs to a 404 upon clicking the Subscribe button — it just does — or why I can’t get friendly permalinks to work. Perhaps some of the plugins that work just fine on others’ sites don’t work on mine because of the theme I chose — c’est la garre

Plugin Madness

There’s only one source for reliable plugins (mostly): WordPress Extends. There are a lot of reliable authors out there but, frankly, if they don’t register their work in Extends, then caveat emptor.

A plugin is code written in one or more PHP pages (with maybe some images and this-and-that) which you add to your installation in the plugins folder at your host site. It’s not all that hard — if you got your WordPress copied to your host yourself, then this is the same procedure. You make the plugin part of your WordPress by going to the Administration’s Plugins page and clicking the plugin’s Activate link. The files become part of your WordPress code until you Deactivate the plugin.

However, many also become part of your database — they add one or more tables. There’s an article by Jeffro2pt0 called, Uninstall – Is There Such A Thing? that walks us through some of the problems of installing plugins. Some plugin authors include an uninstall routine as a button on their Options page and clicking the button removes the entries the plugin added to your database. But the rest of the plugins you install won’t have this nice feature.

Take care about what you add to your WordPress installation. Plugins are not a reasonably resolved issue, yet. WordPress version 2.5 has a plugin installation routine but read Darren Ethier on the subject; that installation routine is not ironed-out. Plugins can bloat your database, and occasionally bring a modest throbbing to your head.

Experimenting with your public blog (the hosted domain installation) is not something the serious blogger should do — perhaps better said: it’s not something to do if you’re serious about blogging/writing. You know that thing Bugs Bunny does when he swallows something bad? He jerks in all kinds of directions? Eek-awck-eek-sqack! That’s your blog when experimenting with plugins. And consider what your visitors will experience while you’re doing this. You can only experiment once you have learned how to backup and restore your database, as well as maintain a working copy of your WordPress installation (your theme files, at least).

Lastly, plugin authors work on various platforms (Unix, Linux, Windows), and these platforms do not all function similarly. It’s likely that if your plugin author talks about “chron,” then the plugin’s auto-run scheduling won’t run for you, if your host operating system doesn’t have the chron service. The author is calling for a service that might not be available for your host platform.

Postscript: There’s also maintenance. You’ll look at your plugins page and find yourself downloading, unzipping, deactivating, uploading, then activating plugins. This is plugins maintenance. The more plugins, the more you’ll do it, and you’ll definitely be doing it a lot whenever WordPress undergoes a significant upgrade because then the plugin authors update their code. Work, work, work, work — which is not writing.

Backing Up Your Database

Your blog is your database and your database is your blog. If you value your writing, safeguard your database.

It’s one of the trials of computers that you have administration to do. Do not overlook sound administration procedures. (It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.)

I don’t know what coming versions of WordPress will look like but safeguarding your database is not a WordPress strong suit. The plugin you should consider installing and learning to use well is wp-phpMyAdmin. The authors took a well-known product called phpMyAdmin and re-presented it as a plugin.

(You could upload phpMyAdmin to your site and use it as an independent interface to your database but your host service probably has an interface ready for you to use. It’s handy to have the plugin because your can go right to it without logging into your host’s control panel.)

Whichever form of phpMyAdmin you use, learn to backup your database using it’s Export facility. This will create an SQL file containing all the table entries for all your posts, pages, comments, etc. In the event of a database blowout (and you can’t count on your host — only yourself) you can recreate your database, ergo: your blog.

(Additionally, the same plugin authors offer BackupWordPress. You can setup a schedule of automatically run backups or run them manually. You can configure the backups to produce just a database backup or that plus all the files for your blog. The files are saved to a folder at your site, and you can have them emailed to you, if they’re within email size limits.)

WordPress appears to assist you in some areas. Your blogroll, for example, has an obscure backup method. It requires the use of a WordPress page that’s part of your installation, as described by Kafkaesqui in his support post. You’d think there’s just be a button or something.

A submenu item of the Administration’s Manage menu item is Export. This will unceremoniously export a limited amount of your database as an XML file. The text for the Export page says,

When you click the button below WordPress will create an XML file for you to save to your computer. … will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. 

Another submenu item of the Administration’s Manage menu item is Import. Reinstalling an XML export has it’s peculiarities, like any punctuation marks in a post or page title will become an ASCII code. It will only be an intact restore if you watch for pathing, some of which you must manually edit before using in another blog with another name or path. The WordPress Export and Imports are a nice offer but watch your step.

To Add Code Or Not To Add Code?

When you setup a user (including yourself), you can chose to use the visual editor or the plain-jane editor.

The visual editor is nice for most bloggers. You can click buttons to insert HTML tags for bolding, italics and all, and it helps with inserting links. However, you can’t insert tags into your writing that aren’t among the tags of the visual editor. Therefore, if you do something like “<p>&nbsp;</p>,” it’s going to be deleted from the page — because that’s how the visual editor handles things. You also can’t include styling with the visual editor; that has to be done in the theme’s stylesheet (which you can modify, if you know how).

The plain jane editor, on the other hand, affords you a lot of tagging elbow-room. You can include lots of HTML in your posts when you turn-off the visual editor. Not all tags seem to function as one might expect, though. Some align parameters, for example, fail to align, (i.e., <td align=”top”> will not move content to the top of the table cell).

There are going to be occasions when you’d like to use a plugin that requires a PHP code to be added to a page (usually sidebar.php) or post. You need to be configured for the plain-jane editor, and to install a great plugin called php.exe. (It’s only mentioned here because it’s related to the editor.)

Firefox or Explorer?

Speaking personally, I’ve come to prefer a tabbed browser, so I use Firefox. (Firefox also has great extensions/plugins.)

There’s not a lot of difference between the way your blog will display in Explorer or Firefox. The native use of tabbed windows in Firefox, though, might make it preferable. You will want to preview your posts and pages (and alternate theme choices) while having the WordPress editor open, and switching to the preview. There are other tabs worth opening for, for example, source pages for your article links — so you can grab a URL or copy text from another source, and so on.

Expecting Comments

For a personal blog, don’t.

As a matter of fact, the greatest joy you’ll have will be spam. Spammers will eventually find you. And that means the search engines are finding you, and listing you. Who knows: you might even acquire an audience — someday.

So why don’t people comment? The NY Times’ Freakonomics asked that question, Who Comments on Blogs, and Why? And, frankly, I don’t comment much either, except at non-personal blogs. Technology and politics are two subjects I sometimes feel I can contribute. That’s about it.

Therefore, in order for you to get comments (which admittedly do feel good) you have to specialize your blog to a — let’s call them — professional topic. That includes “mommy blogs.” Other than that, expect to feel alone.

Use The Built-In Editor Or Not?

Use a word processor. It’ll check your spelling and suggest grammar. But best of all, you can save your writing as you go, then paste it into a post or page, later.

That seems like small, tiny, advice, until you’ve inadvertently clicked a link by accident and watched your WordPress disappear along with your writing. And it will happen because it can. There’s also the bad moment your connection has or your host server. You did such a good job phrasing that thought, and you might never get it back — treat your words like the gems they are.

Warning

Don’t tell anyone about your blog if you’re ever going to reveal anything personal, talk about your employer, client, colleague, or anyone else you know. They won’t like it and it will explode in your hand. It also inhibits what you can say in a personal blog. We’ve all got an ego to maintain, so you might want to make admissions but do you really want to lose any stature you might have with those you know — no matter how valuable those admissions might be?

There’s a plugin I like and use but it’s beating me over the head. It’s Dan Grossman’s DG Review Site. Either Dan didn’t know how to correctly test the plugin or he didn’t think it through.

The idea is to add a drop-down list from which you can select a rating number submitted with a comment. Ergo, one can only submit a rating along with the comment.

Okay.

One can configure the plugin for, among other things, the minimum and maximum ratings (say, one through ten). And you can have more than one ratings request (i.e., how’s my site, how’s this post, how’s my theme, etc.)

Okay.

After adding to my comments code, I was proud of myself for having gotten another great plugin active on my blog. Until I noticed that the default is the lowest rating selection. So, if ten people comment on a post, and three notice the rating request and each rate my post a 6, and the other seven don’t notice or don’t care to select a rating, my post is rated 1.8 — not the 6 it proudly deserves.

Not okay.

There’s no way to flush the rating(s).

Not so great.

Visiting the Plugin in the Parallel Universe of the Backend: I inserted the code. It worked. I logged-on as my tester personae and added a comment, and a rating of 10 for the question, Rate my intelligence. That turned out to be too high for me because later, after seeing how well the plugin worked, I deleted the comment. This threw an error on the comment(.PHP) page preventing the rest of the page from loading. Hurrying over to the Plugins list, I deactivated Dan’s plugin which threw different errors on the page. I hurried over to the comment(.PHP) page and deleted the function.

Whew! Errors gone.

Postscript: I can’t find a way to change the coding — I don’t know PHP well-enough — so maybe I deserve 1.8.