Comprehensive Guide to a Professional Blog Site: A WordPress Example by Michael K. Bergman September 2005 Michael K. Bergman is a co-founder, chief technology officer, and chairman of About BrightPlanet Corporation. He is also the lead project coordinator for the DiDia (document Mike intelligence, document information automation) open source project. Mike’s software management experience includes products in Internet search tools, data warehousing, bioinformatics, accounting, finance, management, planning, electronic mapping and technical areas. He is the author of an award-winning Internet search tutorial and the definitive deep Web white paper, among other publications. He is acknowledged as an expert in search, information theory, and document content. Mike’s current musings may be found on his Web blog site, http://mkbergman.com. © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Gone beyond Blogger? Want to really be aggressive in functionality and scope of SUMMARY content for your personal, professional or corporate blog? If so, this Comprehensive Guide to a Professsional Blog Site may be useful to you. This Guide is the result of 350 hrs of learning and experimentation to test the boundaries of blog functionality, scope and capabilities. I myself began this process as a total newbie about six months ago – which likely shows in gaps and naïveté – but I have been aggressive in documenting as I have gone. The learning from my professional blog journey, still ongoing, is reflected in these pages. This Guide addresses about 100 individual “how to” blogging topics and lessons, all geared to the content-focused and not occasional blogger. More than 140 citations, 80 of which are unique, are provided to other experts with guidance for all of us. The Guide itself occupies 80 pages. It is all free. Is it all good stuff? Of course not! But there is hopefully more than one pony under the pile for those needing to join the “1% club” of purposeful, content- oriented, professional bloggers. In this Guide you will find discussion of these useful topics: How to choose blogging software and add-on tools Taking control of the blogging process by hosting your own site Getting your blog to display and perform right Effective techniques for converting existing documents to your blog site HTML Being efficient in posting, organizing and work-flowing to allow your diarist activities to flow naturally and productively Keeping the blog site pump primed with fresh and relevant content. I created this Guide as a discipline in learning how to be a diarist or journalist, akin to the heyday era of “persons of letters” prior to the telegraph. In part, I undertook this discipline to rekindle those daily journal skills of the past. But, for the most part, I undertook the effort because I believe a fundamentally new means and mechanism for adaptive advantage is being created with social computing, of which blogging is a part. This document is not meant for a single sitting; it is a reference. I hope my learning from capturing the new-to-blogging experience benefits you as well. Michael K. Bergman Iowa City, IA September 2005 Comprehensive Guide to a Professional Blog Site i 050919 Table of Contents SUMMARY ..................................................................................................................................................................i I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................1 II. OTHER BLOGGING GUIDES ............................................................................................................................2 III. APPROACH AND DEVELOPMENT...................................................................................................................5 Re-factoring of My Preparing to Blog Journal Diary...............................................................................................5 My Caveats.............................................................................................................................................................6 IV. PREPARING TO BLOG AND BASIC DECISIONS ............................................................................................7 Hosted or Own Site? ..............................................................................................................................................7 Picking Blog Software.............................................................................................................................................7 Local Hosting..........................................................................................................................................................8 Name and Design...................................................................................................................................................9 Do You Need or Want a WYSIWYG Editor? ..........................................................................................................9 Posts and Comments .............................................................................................................................................9 Advanced Functionality ........................................................................................................................................10 Word Docs to HTML .............................................................................................................................................10 V. BLOG BASICS 101...........................................................................................................................................11 The Loop...............................................................................................................................................................11 The Stylesheet......................................................................................................................................................11 Plug-ins.................................................................................................................................................................11 The Dashboard or Management Center...............................................................................................................12 Pinging..................................................................................................................................................................12 Trackback .............................................................................................................................................................13 Should Trackback be Used?............................................................................................................................14 Permalinks ............................................................................................................................................................14 Blogrolls (or –rolling).............................................................................................................................................14 External Credits and Thanks ................................................................................................................................14 VI. CREATING A LOCAL TESTBED .....................................................................................................................16 Local Install Difficulties .........................................................................................................................................16 No Local Images...................................................................................................................................................17 Site Transfer .........................................................................................................................................................17 VII. ADDING AND CONFIGURING TOOLS ...........................................................................................................19 Plug-ins.................................................................................................................................................................19 Example Code .................................................................................................................................................19 The AI3 Plug-ins ..............................................................................................................................................21 WYSIWYG Editor..................................................................................................................................................22 Better Comment Quicktags ..................................................................................................................................22 The WordPress Quicktags Facility...................................................................................................................22 Alex King's Expanded Javascript Quicktags....................................................................................................24 Configuring and Testing Trackback.................................................................................................................25 Displaying Trackback and Permalinks within Comments Section...................................................................25