Jun 11, 2008
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Setting up your Blog
Choosing what blog to setup and setting up that blog can be difficult for those who haven’t done it before. If the blog you choose has plugins, then choosing what plugins to install is also a difficult decision for many bloggers.
WordPress and Permalinking
Here is what we do everytime we need to setup a blog on one our sites. We have decided that wordpress suited our needs the best. After we download wordpress we try to find a theme that would be optimal for the site we are working on, then we customize the theme to look the way the site looks or if the blog is the site we make it look the way the designer has designed it. We usually set our site to use permalinking, which is a way to customize the way the URL (address bar) looks. So instead of seeing an address with symbols like question marks, you see an address that looks like directories. We usually set our permalink to /%category%/%postname%/ which means it will look just like that except the percent words are replaced with real data. The last settings to setup are all for the comment system, whether you want to approve all comments, just new comments or no comments.
All-in-One SEO Pack
After we setup the basic settings of wordpress to our preferred setup, we choose what plugins we need. There are multiple plugins for every category, we just found the plugins that suited our needs the best. Most of the time our blogs will be serving some kind of SEO purpose, so we download a plugin called All-In-One SEO Pack that takes care of telling the search engine bots what pages it should index and what pages to leave alone. So it doesn’t index duplicate content. Another plugin we use is yaCAPTCHA, it helps cut down on the comment spam by making a user read a random string from a picture and input it into a text field.
Please Link 2 Me and Feedburner
Please Link 2 Me is a plugin that allows the user to copy a snippet of html code that points to the current post. Then they can send it to a friend through email or they can put it on their website. In that same category we have a plugin that allows the user to use any of the popular social bookmarking to bookmark that post. Recently we started to use Feedburner with our blogs, so we got the feedburner plugin that basically redirects a user to your blogs feedburner page when a user clicks on a link that points to your blogs feed.