Blog Savvy, Part 1

I’ve been blogging for about 6 months now. I’m definitely still a fumbling newbie, but despite a few mishaps it’s proving to be great fun and a wonderful way to meet and stay connected with people. A few friends interested in running blogs of their own have asked me what tools I use to do it, so I’ve put together a few posts describing my approach. This first one is about the blog publishing services I use. I’ll do a follow-up later on the hard part: writing.

A word of warning before I dive in: the setup I use is great if — and only if — you want to have complete control over your blog’s content and features, and you are not shy of doing a wee bit of PHP code tweaking. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, check out blog hosting services instead. Blog hosters do all the heavy lifting for you, and most of them are free. LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace and Blogger are some of the most popular.

Now, for those of you who want all the bells and whistles, on to my config:

Blog publishing: I use WordPress, which is one of the top blog publishing packages. It’s quite feature-rich; I haven’t found myself wanting yet. WordPress is easy to extend with plug-ins that offer new features. And with only a little more work you can hack the PHP code to customize anything else about the blog, since it is entirely open-source. You can host it yourself to get complete flexibility, as I do, or use the hosted version from WordPress.com.

Design. Blog look and feel is currently derived from a theme called “Almost Spring”, which you can find here. WordPress’ main site lists many other themes.

Spam. Blog comments tend to attract spammers. I use Akismet, another free WordPress plugin, to find and destroy spam. It works incredibly well, with almost no false positives. Staying spam-free is easy.

Tags. UltimateTagWarrior is a great WordPress extension that helps you add tags to blog posts and display a tag cloud. This screenshot shows you the current tag cloud for MyOwnPirateRadio:

Tags are a useful way to discover posts, as opposed to text search or looking through chronological archives. The tag cloud display gives you an immediate feel for the topical content. And as a publisher I can add nerdy references like this to my posts: all blog posts related to business models.

Comment Discovery: Brian’s Latest Comments is a nifty little plugin that displays an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them. Here’s a screenshot:

Statistics: Stats packages help build a picture of which sites refer traffic to a blog, and which content on a blog is most popular. My web hoster offers a popular statistics package called AwStats. I also use StatTraq which is a WordPress plug-in. StatTraq is a little better at giving blog post-level details, so I use it more often than AwStats. I triangulate between the two sets of statistics, since there are often significant differences. I’ve also tried Google Analytics and found it to be slow and inaccurate. It’s a little hard knowing which numbers to trust.

Web hosting: I host my blog with iPowerWeb. They have proven to be a great Web host over the last few years; inexpensive rates, good support, high reliability, and excellent flexibility about what software you put on your server. If you’re looking to build a custom web site of any sort you should take a look at iPowerWeb. Thanks Craig L for that reference.

Email digest. Some people prefer getting blog content via email instead of RSS. To enable this I’m experimenting with FeedBurner Email Subscription Service. I just did a post on it, which you can read here. FeedBurner also promises a few other benefits to do with blog stats and caching; jury is out on that.

Grant Total Cost: $7.95 per month, which is iPowerWeb’s hosting fee. Everything else is free.