Meevy

WordPress is the open source blogging software. This site uses wordpress now. The wordpress software has to be installed in the web hosting space. Many web hosts offer automatic 1 click install of wordpress. There are various plugins that has to be uploaded using an FTP program to the web host. After uploading, plugins has to be activated, so that we can start using them. The plugins that I have installed already are

1. Romantika’s new blogger to wordpress plugin - Without this plugin all the blogger posts wouldn’t be here. Yes, this plugin imported all the blog posts to wordpress without any problem. It works well.

2. Feedburner plugin - this plugin redirects feeds to the feedburner’s smart feed. This would make the feed unique and accessible by all feed readers.

3. WordPress Database Backup Plugin - this plugin is useful in taking back ups of the database of the blog. It seems only the text content will be backed up using this plugin. Images uploaded using wordpress, plug-ins installed won’t be backed up. When I tried this plugin it worked but the backup could not be downloaded. So I downloaded using the FTP access. However this problem can be rectified by changing the attributes of the backup directory to 777 by selecting the write privilege under Group Permissions and Public Permissions. Also it would be safe to change it to the default 755 and delete the backups after downloading it to the computer. (Video tutorial) (Alternative backup solution)

4. Adsense Injection - Having used to easy-implementation of adsense in blogger, I could not understand the php code in wordpress so I searched for inserting adsense in wordpress and found a couple of plugins. Adsense injection is a simple plugin that inserts adsense randomly inside posts, archives and pages. The number of ads that appear can also be specified under options.

5. Google sitemaps plugin - Sitemaps protocol is now accepted by google, yahoo and msn alike. The stable version of the plugin failed to work. So I got the beta version and it worked. I also added the sitemap to google webmastercentral and verified it by uploading a random html (according to instructions given by webmastercentral).

6. Akismet - Being completely new to wordpress I don’t want to get spam comments daily. Akismet helps in identifying spam comments. However the visitor need not pass through the word verification (like we have it in blogger). Akismet identifies comment spam when there is two or more link in the comment text.

7. Evermore - This is really a good feature I always wanted. Some posts may be interesting and some may be slightly boring. To expect the visitor to go through the long posts is quiet undesirable. The evermore plugin shows only the first few lines and link to full post is displayed. It becomes easy to navigate different posts using evermore.

8. Less - When you use the evermore and click the continue reading it goes to the text that is after the continue reading link. If you install this plugin the read more link will lead you to original post instead of the text part that is unread.

9. runPHP - runPHP enables us to embed PHP code directly into a page or a post. The Archives page (in PHP) was created using this plugin.

10. Clean Archives 2.0 – This plugin helps display the archives in a separate page. (See how-to)

There are some more plugins too that can be utilized for WordPress.

Blogger vs. wordpress - firstly I have been using blogger more than anything else. Hence I would say the easiest and most user friendly is of course blogger. However I have just started using wordpress so it wouldn’t be fair to judge at this time. Whenever I need to install a new plug-in I have to open up the FileZilla FTP client and had to manually upload the files. With blogger everything can be modified with either hand code or just using the layout features of the new blogger. Template colors, font colors, font size modification can be done with ease and no need to worry about backing up etc… Sure the blogger features really rock. I will still be using the winfreeware blog which is in the blogspot domain. This blog is a test and I hope it works as so many people use wordpress. With wordpress it would be slightly tough especially for the non-technical user.