Creating a blog

A ‘blog’, short for ‘web blog’ is an online diary or journal, organised in date order. Blogs are popular as a personal site – a way to share places that you have visited online, your daily life or thoughts on a particular subject. There are personal blogs on almost every imaginable subject. More recently businesses have discovered that a blog is a powerful way to communicate in a more informal manner with customers, to keep them up to date with industry developments, or highlight interesting features of products. Macromedia are a good example of a company that is using blogs in this way, you can read blogs written by several of their employees, such as John Dowdells here: http://www.markme.com/jd/.

In this article we will explore how to create a blog using one of the popular, and free to download blog applications that are available - Wordpress. This is the first of two tutorials looking at Wordpress, this one is suitable for absolute beginners with this tool and will look at the basic install and some of the most important configuration options once it is installed. Next time we will create a completely customised template for your blog and look at how to select which features you want to use.

Choosing your tools

There are a large number of blog applications available for download and use on your own sites – so which should you choose? Obviously your hosting requirements are going to play a part in your choice, all blog applications are going to rely on some kind of server side scripting – PHP, Perl etc. Many also require a database being available such as MySQL.

If you are tied to a hosting account that doesn’t have any server side scripting capabilities then you are going to be limited in your choice to blog software that doesn’t run on your server. There are options for this, the most well know being Blogger (http://www.blogger.com). The Blogger software runs on the Blogger server and after creating an account you make your blog entries by logging into your account on the Blogger web site.

Adding a new blog entry using Blogger

After creating a new entry Blogger sends it via FTP to your web server, so you don’t need any special capabilities on your server at all as you just have the HTML pages created by blogger and sent via FTP.

Blogger is a really quick way to get started with a blog and an excellent choice if you are limited in your hosting capabilities. You are able to fully customise the template that is used to display your blog so it is possible to get your blog pages to conform to the look and feel of the rest of your site by editing the template after logging into your Blogger account.

Services such as Blogger are great to dip your toe in the blogging water however they can be limiting. Your own site contains just the static generated pages – no database to enable you to re-use the content in other ways. You are tied to the tools that Blogger provides for your blog and you are also reliant on a third party service being up and running for your blog to work. If you have the capability on your server then installing your own blog software, which will enable you to login to an administration area on your own server to post to your blog, is going to give you far more flexibility in how you use your blog site.

Blog software features

While the different software packages available for download have a whole host of different features there are some basic features that you will probably wish to have on your blog. An archive facility so that users can get to older posts easily; a search feature and the ability for users to post comments. Assuming that you will get a hosting account once you have chosen a package then you can pick from any of the applications. One major player in the blog software world is Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) . They offer a fully featured package which uses Perl and MySQL (or can run without the use of MySQL if you do not have a database available to you).

Moveable Type does have a free version available; however there is no support for users of the free version and it may not be used for commercial blogs and you are limited to only being able to create one user and 3 blogs with this free version. Movable Type is also the most problematic software to use in terms of automated blog spam unless you sign up for their Typekey service which requires that people who wish to comment on blogs register which might be attractive to you or very unattractive depending on the type of use you are going to put a blog to.

One point in Movable Type’s favour is the large number of plugins available for it - to add new functionality, however as other blog applications pick up more users they too are offering more plugins and extra code that can be used to add new features.

If you are creating a blog on behalf of a client and they would like to think that the software used had commercial paid-for support behind it, then you might choose Moveable Type in order to have that support in place, however if you are just wanting a blog solution to learn for your own sites and to use in flexible ways on different sites then there are other solutions out there that do not have restrictions on usage and are free to download no matter how you wish to use them. One such application is the one that we are going to focus on in the rest of this article and in the next article, and that is Wordpress.

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for "The Mousetrap" at St. Martin's Theatre in London's West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn't take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.

Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com', which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.

As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:

Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272

Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.

In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun' with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.

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