WordPress is great… with a little help
WordPress is the software for blog sites that I chose to use for this blog (which is pretty obvious, since I haven’t even changed some of the default links that are supplied). Since I tend to comment on games, cameras, lenses, or services that I like – or don’t – it’s probably about time that I commented on WordPress.
In a word, for free software, I personally think that it’s outstanding. While most people probably use WordPress by way of wordpress.com, which will happily host your blog for you, I went with the slightly higher effort approach of getting a hosting provider (InMotion), and installing the free and open source WordPress software onto the virtual server that they provide. I figure I’d learn more this way, and also have more flexibility – and both those things are indeed true.
For something that’s free, WordPress sets the bar very high. Installation was a breeze, updates are automatic and seamless, and usability is great; you can pretty much just install it and start plugging away. Even better, while the hosted version of WordPress lets you choose from various themes, running it yourself also offers a wide variety of plug-ins that customize the behavior of things in various ways. There’s three that I find very useful, all free, including the one I started using recently to avoid my longer posts from destroying your RSS reader…
- RSS No More (by Jerome Neuveglise). As you’ve no doubt noticed, to get this far on this post, you had to click on a “More” link – even if you’re reading via RSS. I wanted to do this from the beginning, because while I can’t stand RSS feeds that give you just 4 lines and force you to click to see anything meaningful, I also don’t like ultra-long RSS content that takes ages just to scroll through. But oddly, WordPress removed the ability to cut RSS feeds at the “more” tag; this seemed to be on purpose, out of a distaste for blogs that were using this unnecessarily to create more page views. Clearly not my intent since this is a personal site with no ads, but I’ve definitely written some long posts with lots of large images – and I’m sure people don’t want that clogging up their RSS reader. Also, sometimes I include a SmugMug gallery that doesn’t render in RSS readers (at least not Google Reader). This plug-in lets me be a little less annoying!
- WordPress Backup to Dropbox (by Michael De Wildt). This plug-in creates a back-up of your WordPress site, and puts the backup on Dropbox, which is another cool service I mentioned in the “Backup & Sharing” page. This in turn is automatically replicated to PCs of your choosing. Both the site itself as well as the underlying database that houses a lot of the content get backed up; this is critical, despite that some backup plug-ins only did one or the other. It might take a little effort to restore given that your database backup is one big .sql file, but the plug-in is great and highly recommended – though I haven’t had to restore yet.
- Google Analytics for WordPress (by Joost de Valk). It’s totally unnecessary for me to run Google Analytics, but since we were doing some web analytics related things at work, I thought I should just give this a shot. What can I say, it works, setup is easy, and now I can see how many people visit!
It’s not like the experience was completely without flaws; a lot depends on themes and I had a heck of a time finding a theme that actually worked correctly in various versions of IE as well as Chrome (my preferred browser), and even once I found something, getting the header image to display properly/at all was harder that one would think. And while RSS No More helps, it’s not so easy to see how RSS feeds are going to get rendered; I only recently figured out that to get an image centered in the RSS, I’ve got to put it in a paragraph that has the center align parameter explicitly set – since CSS styles don’t propagate through to RSS feeds!
Granted, all of this is more work than just using Facebook, Twitter, comments in Google Reader, or other such thing to fire off quick status updates or comments – but I guess I’m a fan of less frequent but deeper long-form content – that’s ultimately controlled by me (in both format and ownership) – and not by Facebook or others! I think that makes me a dinosaur in the modern tech age, but I guess I’m OK with that!