How To Blog On WordPress For Beginners, A Post For My Friend Carrie

St-Ambroise St. next to a park in Montreal Canada. I love this photo because it captured movements of light; I physically was moving the camera on purpose to create this effect. Taken on the 17th of June 2006 with a Sony Cybershot DSC-P93 5.1 MP camera. Part of the Dreamscape Series.

Since I have had a website or blog since 1998, and because of my background as a computer scientist, I find that I suppose that a lot of people are well versed with computers and blogging, like my friend Candice. However, the reality of the situation, is that there are a lot of different skill sets. From beginners to very advanced users.

Recently, my wife has started blogging. I had set up pretty much everything for her and explained how to do, since she had to host her pictures on a photo sharing site like flickr or zooomr. She has gotten really good at it. One of the main reasons we are in Taiwan is our friend Carrie, who has been very welcoming to us in this new country. Since she is planning to leave to travel around Asia and the USA for 4 months, I will give her some advice with this post. This advice is good for most beginners. It is also good for bloggers using other platform than WordPress. On The Memoirs, I have accumulated close to 400 posts already since May, and I have stepped up the posting frequency to blog once each day. Most days, I try to post 2 to 3 times. I have yet to have writer’s block for my blogging.

A blog is a great platform for yourself. I have had prospective employers, friends and new people read my blog. I am always careful not to blog too much in detail about my current work and make sure that I never say anything detrimental to my employers on my blog. I also keep a clear line between my blogging and my real identity, though it isn’t too hard to find out who I am. I use my blog as a stage for all of my photography and writing, as well as some of my art. It is a very creative and flexible medium, that a lot of people will underestimate; I did.

Let me just say a few words on Memoirs On A Rainy Day. The Memoirs started as a daily diary/essay that I used to write when I was a teenager. It evolved quickly, over the years, to be a series of essays on my life and my experiences. The current version was started in late May 2006. It has changed direction in the past few months, but has been firmly entrenched in the photography and movie/tv review stage until our most recent move to Taiwan. Since then, the focus has shifter from entertainment/movies/tv to reports on our travels in Asia and our life as ESL teachers. I found that like most writers, you need experiences to write about before you have anything worthwile to say.

Before September 2006, I had 800 visits a day. I spent a whole month without blogging, though it didn’t seem like it. I started again in October 2006. At the time, the daily visits were down to 300-400. Currently, I have a 1600-3000 daily readers. I use a variety of tools to enable me to maintain this following. Most recently, I have been singled out as a blogger from Taiwan, and people I have met only a few times, are reading my blog, without me talking to them about it!

But I digress.

Let’s get back to the main subject.

Basic blogging on WP.

1. Edition. Try writing your posts directly into the WP editor or write them in Word, then cut and paste them into Notepad before putting them into the WP editor. Why? Because if you use Word and cut and paste it directly, you get all these pesky tags from Microsoft Word that you can not see. I do this to catch the spelling mistakes and typos everybody does. If you use Firefox for browsing, the latest version has a built in spellchecker when you type comments. Also, the WP editor has a spellchecker feature. I find that I enjoy using Word when I do not want to be online. It also creates a backup of your posts.
2. Photos. Set-up a flickr or Zooomr account so that you can host your photos without worrying about storage space. WordPress offers 50 MB of storage space for your files. You can purchase more, but you it is better to use photo sharing sites. In my mind, if you just upload photos, the photo sharing sites are a lot cheaper and better. Flickr and Zooomr have both monthly upload limits (I think that it is 100MB for both sites per month), though currently flickr Pro accounts do not have any limits, except for filesize (10 MB). Zooomr Pro accounts is 4GB per month for now, though I have exceeded it without any problems. Both flickr and Zooomr do not limit your storage space, that is fine and dandy because I have 3700 photos in my Zooomr Pro account. Once you have uploaded your photos, copy and paste the address for the image and use this in your post for the image location. If you do not want to resize your images yourself, this can be automatically done by the photo sharing sites. Resizing means making them smaller because you do not need giant photos on websites. you need no more than 500×500 or 500×750. This also makes your blog a lot faster to load. Remember that if an image is on the web, you can easily incorporate it into one of your posts; just get the URL of the image and insert it into the “insert image” button of WP.
3. Content. Make sure you have content. Content is key. For the first few months, build up a database of posts. Try posting everyday, that is what makes people visit your blog again and again. In the first few days of blogging, I blogged 92 posts. That is because I transfered some posts from blogger to WP, but still in the first 3 months, I created 194 posts. Some blogs have been turned into books. Heather Armstrong from dooce is a fine example. Wonder what dooce means nowadays? Mrs Armstrong got dooced. Meaning that she actually was the 1st person to get fired because of what she was writing about her job on her blog. From there comes the term, dooce. Dooce is actually the name of her blog.
4. Tag. Tag all your posts with tag-words or categories to make them easier to find on the web. Most platforms make this quite easy. In WP, make sure that you assign categories to all of your posts. Before I used to have a lot of categories. I find that there is a difference between categories and tag-words. Tag words are just descriptive terms directly applied to posts. Categories are more broad based. WP.com only permits categories, which they equate to tag-words. People are able to research tag-words through sites such as technorati.
5. Multimedia. If you enjoy radio shows, try making your own podcasts (podcasts are recordings that people make on their computers of themselves and music that they want to play. It is like your own personal radio station). Tools like odeo can make it very easy. If you enjoy video, try video blogging (making short videos by using a small camera attached to your computer). Most computers come with webcams, and they are easy to configure to record video. Use basic video editing software incldued with Microsoft Windows to assemble your video blog. Use YouTube to share it. You can integrate YouTube videos directly into your posts by using a simple command(). Some people actually create little documentaries with simple cameras and upload them as well.
6. Static Pages. Create a few static pages. For example, if you are planning a trip, create a static page that talks about that and that will put together all of the posts during your travels. Don’t forget an About page and a Contact page, so that people can learn more about your blog and you. Some people will present their posts in almost a book index format, completely inversed from the way they appear usually. This is interesting if you want to see the original posts and the evolution of the posts. For example, I could seperate my “blog book” into different chapters, either based chronologically or by theme. Though by attaching categories to posts, themes are usually taken care of, though inelegant in my opinion. I could put my life in Montreal in one chapter, and present it nicely and then put my life in Taiwan in another chapter.
7. Maintain Interest. Maintain the interest of your readers by including multimedia content on your posts. Try posting pictures you like from flickr or Zooomr, or videos from YouTube. This makes posts fun to read and show more of your interests and personality.
8. Strategic Posting. Once you have a good number of posts, look at your stats and try and figure out what your readers are reading, ie which posts are read the most. Then try some strategic posting to try and maintain that readership.
9. Comment on blogs that you read and try making blog exchanges (putting people you like on your blogroll and asking them to put you on theirs. Be advised, that asking to be put on a blogroll is against blogetiquette; the blogger will have to put you on their blogroll without you asking. This is easily done when bloggers monitor their incoming links through technorati). I have stopped adding blogs to my blogroll and I keep it short. To get on the blogrolls of some people is quite prestigious. I remember when I got onto the blogroll of chartreuse, I was really stoked! Make sure that your comments are relevant. Some blogs have policies regarding comments and must be on topic, meaning that they must discuss the post and what it was about. Make sure you do not post links to your blog or direct links to your posts in your comment. That is also considered bad blogetiquette. Normally, when you comment, you always leave the URL of your blog already. Some bloggers have different view on these things. I tend to edit out superfluous URLs if they are not relevant.
10. Interact. Reply to all comments made to your posts. One of the best parts of blogging is the comments and interactions you have with other bloggers. One good thing is that these discussions are always not in real time, meaning that you can take the time whenever you want to reply to them. Some comments on my blog have led to very good posts.
11. Propagate. Use memediggers like digg, nowpublic, netscape and reddit to share your posts with the most people. Be careful though not to share your diary with everyone, make sure it is relevant, like a news commentary or specific advice.
12. Monitor. Create a technorati account and claim and configure your blog. You can check who links to your blog and your ranking. At the latest count, technorati has more than 60 million blogs indexed.