How to Start a Blog

What in the world is a Blog?

The word “blog” is a contraction of Web-Log. In Basic terms, it is a normal website, but presented in the form of a diary, in which the author or publisher can write every day or as frequent as he likes and visitors will see the latest entry first. A blog is written like a diary because it makes reading a snap and finding content is easier than traditional website layouts. So now that you know that a blog is a website, let’s keep going.

How do I Start a Blog?

First of all, you need to know that there are many blog platforms available online to start a blog. A blogging platform is a software that helps the author or writer of the blog, manage the content easily and be able to interact with the visitors by allowing comments on each entry. The most popular platforms are Wordpress and Blogger. These two blogging platforms offer free blogs for the general public and you can start a blog in as little as 3 minutes; But there is a catch! yes, some free blogging platforms do not allow bloggers to use their blogs for commercial purposes, and that includes not being able to monetize your blog with advertisements or affiliate links (check their terms of use for the latest details) plus, your blog address will look something like http://yourblog.blogspot.com which is not as appealing as having your own domain name like http://Yourblog.com which is more attractive and you own the contents of your blog. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Add Plugins to your Wordpress Blog

Wordpress Plugins are small pieces of code you can activate in your blog if you want to add a certain feature. For example, you want the most recent comments of your blog to appear in the right side menu, then you can use a plugin that is already made for this feature to function in your blog. There are thousands of plugins offering a wide variety of functions which vary from SEO plugins (search engine optimization) to automatic image gallery builders plugin and many other cool plugins you can integrate to your blog in minuteswithout much work. To see the most popular and newest plugins, check the Wordpress plugin directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

To add a plugin, first download it to your computer. To install it you have 2 options:

1. (old way) Decompress the file in a new directory of your computer and upload it to your host via FTP. The file path for the plugins directory usually is /public_html/wp-content/plugins/ (it will vary from host to host). Just upload the directory containing all the plugin files to this directory.

2. Upload the plugin without decompressing it (usually .zip file) directly through the “Add new” page from the Plugins menu

Now, go to your Blog’s Admin page, and select “Add New” from the Plugins Menu at the left side of the admin menu:

After you upload the plugin, You need to Activate it or else you will not be able to use it. To activate it, go to “Installed” under the Plugins Menus and look for the plugin you just uploaded and click the “Activate” link.

After your plugin is activated, it should appear in the “Currently Active Plugins” section on top of the plugins page.

Popular Wordpress Plugins

Get Recent Comments -Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

StatPress -The real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, etc.

WordPress Related Posts - WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.

FeedWordPress - FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.

WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Flickr Photo Album - This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site.

Shutter Reloaded - Darkens the current page and displays an image on top (like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc.), but is a lot smaller (10KB) and faster.

Instructions are for wordpress self hosted blogs only.

So now that you have your blog installed and ready to use, you want to change it’s appearance… Worpress has the ability to use themes or designs to change your blog’s appearance completely. You can change header graphics, link colors ,text styles, sidebar size, add sidebars in both sides, change header size, add menus and much more. You can find free themes by doing a quick google search on “wordpress themes” or if you want to get official wordpress approved themes then go to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes and browse through the free catalog of themes (thousands of free themes organized by topic).

Once you find a theme that you like, download it to your computer and decompress the file in a new directory in your computer. Once, decompressed, you need to upload the folder with all the files to your wordpress “theme” directory via FTP. The directory is usually /public_html/wp-content/themes/ but it will vary from host to host. Make sure you upload all the theme’s files in the theme directory.

After the theme upload is complete, simply go to your wordpress admin (yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and select “themes” under the Appearance left menu:

If the theme was uploaded successfully, it should appear as a preview image. In this blog for example, the theme used is Freshy 2. To use it, simply click on the preview image and select “activate” on the top right corner of the screen .

Themes can be extensively modified, but this is for slightly more advanced users with html knowledge preferably. To edit your theme by sections, go to the “editor” in the Appearance menu and select the section you want to edit. Once you select the section you want to edit (header, body, main page, posts, etc.) you will see the editable code. Make sure you hit the “update changes” button before navigating away or viewing the changes made to your actual theme.

Many themes already include header graphics, images, css (cascading style sheets) and multimedia elements. In order to change them, you have 2 options:

1.Make new images in your favorite image editing software (i.e. Adobe Photoshop) with the same specifications (size and file extension) and replace the images via FTP.

2. Make the changes to the code itself for it to call new images or different types of files if you want to keep the default theme images untouched. If you are a beginner, we recommend you overwrite the existing images with your new ones (remember to leave the file name and extension intact with the original.