Awesome! Great to see so much participation so early in the game!
Looks like I need to clarify a few things:
- How you build your sites / landing pages is unimportant. I'm using WPMU, but that doesn't mean you have to. I may even do some static sites for shits and giggles.
- Reading and learning is great, but your learning will accelerate like crazy by doing. So, IMO, it's best to jump in with both feet.
- If you are uncomfortable with scripts like WP, but have some basic HTML knowledge, build a static site and go from there. If you need help installing Wordpress or another script, ask for help. If I can't help, then there is probably someone else that can.
Turbolapp asked me via PM what the next step is after getting Wordpress installed. Well, let's start by pointing people to
this thread for the definitive answer. I'll provide the short answer.
After I get Wordpress installed, I'll upload several different
themes and
plugins. Once I get the themes and plugins uploaded, I'll go about setting all the options I want and turning on the plugins.
This is the list of options I change / edit:
- Under Options, I edit the tagline, blog address (if needed), membership and what day of the week to start on. WP defaults to Monday, I like it to start on Sunday. Then hit "Update" to save.
- Next, I go to the Writing tab and add some additional sites to ping under Update Services. This is the list I currently use:
Code:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
- Moving along, I go to the Reading tab, and change the Syndication Feeds to 10 and "Use Summary". I do this so that if someone uses my RSS feed for their own splog, they won't get the whole article. This will only work if you use the "More" button when writing your posts. For my splogs, I don't bother with this setting.
- Under Discussion, I uncheck the email notification stuff (I get enough crap in my mailbox) and check the box for "Administrator must always approve a comment" This controls spam.
- Skip Privacy
- For Permalinks I use
Code:
/%category%/%postname%/
That way my URLs show up as
Code:
http://www.my-blog.tld/category/post-name
This is for SEO reasons. Not a big deal, but every little bit helps.
- Skip Misc
- Done
I like using Wordpress because: a) I'm used to it and can set it up very quickly. b) It's very widely supported. c) See a.
If you plan on building static sites, that's fine, just don't forget to ping the aggregators occasionally. This will tell them that your site / page has fresh content and hopefully draw the spiders (Search Engine spiders that is).
Umm...time for a cigarette...I'll add more later
