Blogging in WP

(This is re-posted from a page of the same name on Sublime Oblivion.)

Since I’ve used WordPress (WP) for quite a while now, perhaps I’m now competent enough to give some advice for would be (and current!) bloggers interested in using this platform.

Starting Out

* Since moving from Blogger to self-hosted WP in November 2008, I’ve never looked back. Though the learning curve is somewhat steeper, it should not take an inordinate amount of your time. Once you get to grips with it, the day to day operation of your blog will become significantly faster and easier.

If you already have a blog on Blogger, making the transition is extremely easy – everything is automatized. There’s similar support for all the other major blogging platforms.

Furthermore, WP has extraordinary scope for customizing your blog once you acquire some minimal CSS skillz. Well-designed WP blogs almost invariably look better and have niftier features than their Blogger counterparts.

Below you can see WP’s dashboard, your blog’s central control room.

* Self-hosting is inexpensive and gives you a greater amount of control over the content, not to mention the ego-boost from having your own domain name. I recommend bluehost, which is cheap, reliable and offers easy installation and automatic upgrades to popular things like the WP blogging platform, the phpBB forum and the Joomla! content management system.

* Play around with it to get the hang of it – it’s fairly fool proof, so you’re unlike to do much damage. Take advantage of Google, WP Support and Forums. If you’re really stumped, you may want to get WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Themes and Upgrades

* I strongly recommend the K2 theme. Though at first sight rather plain, there is a wide variety of themes to choose from and it is highly customizable (I currently use Dueling Sidebars). More importantly, it has a very powerful array of AJAX features like Live Search, Live Comments and Rolling Archives that are sure to impress visitors.

* Upgrading WP is useful to get new features, and besides newer versions are typically easier to use – despite occasional frustrations. That said, you need to take a few precautions. First, back up all your data – in rare cases, a new version embedded onto your specific configurations can trigger a catastrophic failure and fixing it will be a days-long pain in the ass. Second, do yourself a favor and check out the commentary on WP Forums before jumping the gun. If too many people are complaining, chances are the new release is buggy and will be amended within the next few days.

* The K2 theme I use has frequent nightly builds. If you use it, do update once in a while. However, if you have a lot of custom code then that may not be a good idea. On the other hand, it will eventually have to be done since older versions of K2 tend to degrade with newer versions of WP. Save your old files and upgrade, and then redo any customizations manually (or if you have super scripting skillz write a program to do it).

* As you start posting, be sure to organize your posts into broad “Categories” and narrower “tags”. They are necessary for infusing some order onto your blog and if you don’t start doing it right away, updating old posts will be a right pain.

Design

* If you want to make your own designs, I highly recommend the GIMP free-ware which gives you most of the functions of higher-level image processing programs without making you pirate / pay exorbitant amounts of money for them. If you want to create transparency, go to Layer –> Transparency –> Add Alpha Channel, select the area you want to clear with the area selection tools (the Wand if you want it to encompass a particular color gradient), press Delete and save as a PNG file. To superimpose one image on top of another, go to Layer –> New Layer and then drag over with your mouse the top image onto the bottom one, then move it around or resize as you see fit. You can see examples of both on this image.

* Gravatars are globally-unique avatars that appear besides any comments you make on other WP-run sites, where it is enabled. Just enable their use in WP Settings and use this site to create your own gravatar.

* To remove the annoying title links from your post and page headings, locate this code in your Loop, Index, Page and Single Post: `<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”<?php k2_permalink_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>`, and delete the `title=”<?php k2_permalink_title(); ?>”` part.

Plugins

* Plugins make a WP site really tick (or not!)… Here’s a list of the ones I find useful or indispensable. (Note: in WP 2.8, you can actually search for them, and automatically download and unpack, from within the WP control room!).

Essential:

Add to Any: Subscribe Button – helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader.
Akismet – once your blog gets wider publicity, it will attract hordes of spammers. Some kind of program to exterminate them all becomes necessary and Akismet steps up to the task. As of the time of writing, I’ve had 845 genuine comments (actually perhaps closer to 1000, because some commenters also like to multiple post spam and I usually contract them down to one) and 3,813 spam comments! So as soon as your site makes it out into the Sun, expect the ratio of on-topic comments to fall at 20-25%.
All in One SEO Pack – search engine optimization toolkit, like how you want Google search results on your site to appear.
Google XML Sitemaps – to inform search engines of new updates to your blog.
Multi-Level Navigation Plugin – really cool thing allowing you to customize your own dropdown menu. I’ve dedicated a whole section specifically to it.
Page Links To – allowing you to point any posts and pages to a URL of your choosing, this is a must have if you want seamless intergration of your WP blog with any other on-line resources you might have.
Subscribe to Comments – allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, and thus helps in drawing in commens and forming longer discussions.

Very Useful:

NextGEN Gallery – probably the best photo gallery for easy integration into WP, as I did here.
Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – an easy-to-integrate form that will send communications securely to your e-mail. I am using the Ocadia theme.
ShareThis – allows you to place a Share This button onto your posts for easy sharing on popular social networking sites like Facebook. However, it’s only really worth implementing if your blog is popular and is actually going to get shared; otherwise, it’s kind of sad, hence the reason I’m not using it (yet!).
Simple Tags – makes organizing tags much easier.
Twitter Tools – if you want your Twitter postings to appear on your blog, this is a good enough plugin. I say good enough because it’s simple, robust and without graphics… and that’s great! tweets are meant to be minimalistic!
WP Polls – excellent AJAX-powered tool for making pools however and wherever you want to.

Just Nifty:

Comments Vote – crisp, clean votes on whether you like a comment or not. I wish more people would use it here.
Featured Posts – only worth going in to if you make a lot of posts.
Global Translator – its main problem is that the translations are shit…but what can you expect? However semantic intelligence is going to see rapid improvements in the years ahead.
WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT – for organizing and managing web site navigation, such as via K2’s standard header menu.
WP-Cumulus – a really cool plugin that styles your tags onto a rotating sphere.
WP-Print – make your blog posts and pages easily printable.

Dropdown Menu

* How to use the Multi-Level Navigation Plugin. Install it in your WP plugins directory and write <?php if (function_exists('pixopoint_menu')) {pixopoint_menu();} ?> in header.php, where you want it to appear on the header. Style the appearance with the PixoPoint Multi-level CSS Generator. There’s a small bug in that it… kind of doesn’t work, so make sure to fix this by adding z-index:1000; somewhere in the second “paragraph” beneath #suckerfishnav, #suckerfishnav ul#suckerfishnav.

Figuring out the Menu Contents system is not hard. Be aware that you can use the Custom Fields to write your own HTML code for the header menu. For instance, you could have stuff like image links, etc. Playing with the Settings is likewise easy.

To get titles in CAPS, add “text-transform: uppercase;” where appropriate.

To get the nice rounded effect when you hover over a title and it gets hi-lighted, use the code below (set the value to “0″ if you want it plain squared, which is preferable for the sub-menus).

border-top-left-radius: 5px;
border-top-right-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 5px;
-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;

To experiment with transparency, use the code below:

-moz-opacity: 0.8; /* for mozilla */
opacity: 0.8; /* for safari */
khtml-opacity: 0.8 /* for konquerer and older safari */

To change the width of the sub-menu boxes, you need to alter three values though it would be too tedious to show exactly which here. Figure it out yourself.

Site Stats

* Up until recently I used and displaced SiteMeter on my site. It gives you a fair idea of where your site is going, but unless you want to pay for it – and I don’t, then most of the information you get is going to be deleted after every month or 500 visits. From the time I started it on SublimeOblivion.Com in November until I discontinued it a few days ago, this site received 20,000+ visitors (to which should be added another 16,000+ from the old Da Russophile at Blogger).

* Google Analytics is much better (and you can embed it onto your site using the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin). I started using it on May 11, 2009. The level of detail is stunning.

It also has a nifty map overlay which gives me information such as how many people visit my site from different countries. The top three countries are the US (1,874), the UK (504) and Russia (272). In the latter, the cities most besotted with my work are Moscow (116), Kirov (38), Novosibirsk (36) and St.-Petersburg (24). One person from Elektrostal lingered for 11:18 mins. Hi! My champion American admirer is from Malverne, who I’m guessing is Mike Averko.

* If you’re obsessed with site rankings, then list your blog / check out Technorati, Alexa and Google Page Rank.

Advertising

* Don’t bother with Google Ads. They siphon off most of your cash and if you have a small site then you’re not going to earn anything because they only pay out once you hit 100$. Instead…

* How To Get Advertisers Or Sponsors For Your Website

* For a 125×125 sidebar ad, the benchmark rate is $1-2 CPM (cost per thousand page impressions). So if you have 15,000 monthly visits, you could demand up to 40$ per month. This is assuming the image links are no-follow, so they’re gaining exposure and direct clicks, rather than any real SEO benefit.

* A do-follow link commands a significantly higher price. For instance, that above site could farm out text ads are are not no-follow for around $25. It may double its revenues from the 125×125 sidebar ad. However, Google doesn’t approve of this and may penalize you in the search rankings if it finds out – and being Google, it invariably will.

* Those are ballpark figures. They can vary widely between cites. For instance, a credit card site can command a much higher CPM than a site about Russia, where advertisers generally don’t have a lot of cash to flash about.

* Know your price. Don’t whore your site out.

* But don’t be too greedy either. You want your clients happy. If they’re not, they’ll come back to you after a month and demand a big shave.

* Don’t rush into long term deals unless you’re sure it will be very profitable for you. Though it’s nice to get a wad of cash up front, the downside is that it reduces your flexibility. It will cause all kinds of headaches if you want to substantially redesign your site. And it will really suck if your site hits the bigtime, losing you lots of additional dosh.

(thanks for Andy Young @ Siberian Light for many of these tips)

It’s the Content that Makes the Blog

This is the most important part.

Don’t spend inordinate amounts of time perfecting your blog layout. Ultimately, it’s what you write that will attract people to your site, not CSS bling.

Second, if you spend too much time on the layout, it will become cluttered. This is a constant struggle of mine. Clutter is a cardinal sin in web site design, especially when it drowns out the important features – ease of navigation and above all, short loading times.

Changing your theme is like a breath of fresh air, but don’t keep the windows open all night either, or your creativity will freeze. Don’t become too absorbed in the grease and mechanics. Let your spirit soar and your type fingers drum on.

Related posts:

1. Happy Birthday to S/O!
2. Best Designed Russia Blogs
3. vodka.IMPORTANT, and other things that define Sublime Oblivion
4. A Short Guide to the Top 10 Russia Blogs
5. Editorial: Lovely Levada