{"id":350,"date":"2011-06-28T06:07:05","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T06:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/?p=350"},"modified":"2011-06-28T06:09:47","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T06:09:47","slug":"wordpress-is-great-with-a-little-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/?p=350","title":{"rendered":"WordPress is great… with a little help"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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). \u00a0Since 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0WordPress 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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. RSS No More <\/strong>(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<\/strong> 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!<\/li>\n
  2. WordPress Backup to Dropbox <\/strong>(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<\/a>” 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.<\/li>\n
  3. Google Analytics for WordPress <\/strong>(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!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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!<\/p>\n

    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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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). \u00a0Since 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 \u00a0WordPress 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354,"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}