Posts Tagged ‘blog’

Posted on September 4, 2009 - by John

Blog post inspiration – Solve a problem!

Walking through the Green in Dublin city on Monday morning, I was wondering where people get their ideas for writing their blog posts.

For me when I am trying to solve a problem with my wordpress blog, get some widget working, formatting a post, I go searching for the answer. For the genre I write in usually in my blogs, inspiration comes in the form of solving a problem! Because if you can answer a question, or even ask one, you have your inspiration for your post already.

There is nothing more satisfying than figuring out how something works! Sharing that information in your blog can be so helpful to others and also satisfy the human need to share information. I have often found a blog post that answered a simple question, while I was looking everywhere for the answer.

Of course blogging is not only about answering a question, it is about sharing ideas and views as well.

But solving a problem is always a good topic to write about, it always makes me more interested in writing blog posts.  I created this chart for myself as a guide for my blog topics I write in this manner.

For topics I write in this manner I find the following makes for a more interesting post, if you are trying to write about a question you answered, you solved a problem.

The question

• You have a question that you need answered.
• The question must be your question – Of course you can answer any question, but I find if you are passionate about solving the problem that passion is reflected in your post!
• If you cannot solve the problem you can take your blog post in a different direction. You can ask your blog community to help, or try to solve yourself and blog the results.

The answer

• You have researched the problem and solved it.
• You have tested the results.

Creating the post

• Write about your results.
• If you found the solution great, if not still blog and share with your community promoting interaction within your blog.

Just one of my ways for writing a particular type of post, feel free to share yours! How do you find inspiration for your blog posts?

Posted on June 24, 2009 - by John

Dear Wordpress – Thank you!

I remember a good few months back an Irish blogger wrote about an Irish airline and a glitch he found on their website, some of the comments in relation to this particular post on his website were discovered to be from the Irish airline staff themselves and they had – shall we say some negative comments to make.

What shocked me most about this incident was one of these comments criticised the blogger for using the wordpress blogging platform which was running his website, using some phrasing along the lines that it was amateurish.

Perhaps it is an irrelevant comment by a person who was making the comment out of anger and ignorance, but I thought to myself, name something better? Seriously! Describe to me blog management software that is flexible, adoptable, user friendly – used by millions from the likes of myself to British billionaires and Prime Ministers, and did I mention that all this is FREE!

Thank you – wordpress people, for bringing information to millions of people and providing the authors of this information with a wonderful platform for doing this!

Despite my wonderful words of gratitude in the above statement, I decided to shoot myself in the foot and try another platform. Mostly so I had a relevant basis of comparison for this post, and because I am geeky like that, ok the geeky thing was the main reason…

Having installed Movable Type blogging platform last week on my server, which I did also use 5-6 years ago and had terrible problems with rebuilding posts and such, I found myself lost – back to wordpress it was. I came at it with an open mind, but could not find any reason to switch platforms, for me it offered no wow factor which would make me interested in using it.

I am not going to make this a post about which platform is better – of course this is a huge can of worms and a preference for the individual, but rather I am going to briefly outline why wordpress is the blogging platform of choice for so many people!

From the one click install technique, (and yes I know you need to set up the SQL database and config file first, but after you ace that – you’re well on the way), to easy to install plugins and themes, your blog is ready for its content. So perfect for any beginner who wants a self hosted solution.

To boil all the features down into one short paragraph, you can make wordpress into your own baby.

The design and features you can use are endless, and the amount of people on hand that offer their services when you can’t figure it out is endless* (* sometimes at a price – like anything else), the amount of free designs and plugins to extend functionality that is on offer is so great you really don’t have to splash out on often expensive designs if you don’t want to or cant afford it. I wrote a post outlining some great plugins which compliment your installation greatly, you can find it here. Having mentioned support I being to think of a somewhat negative point, there has to be one, right?

Support! Wordpress should offer a support package, which would undoubtedly be in great demand. I understand wordpress does offer premium services on there hosted wordpress.com site, but for self hosted blogs paid support would be great.

To have someone on hand when something goes wrong, or when you have been trying to get something right for hours and it is just not working. Wordpress does offer support forums, which are of course not the same as dedicated support, don’t get me wrong there are some great people on wordpress willing to help, but a paid support service, would mean dedicated and fast responses where required.

Wordpress is easy to use, and it continues to evolve with the internet into a simple but extendable blogging platform. Dear Wordpress – Thank you!

Posted on June 4, 2008 - by John

Six Apart launches TypePad AntiSpam

Six Apart has launched TypePad AntiSpam, available for both Movable Type and Wordpress this open source software hopes to combat all your spam problems.

Being open source, including the back-end must be a worry to potential users, as its main competitor Akismet is not open source and has proved a success for the most part. However we are promised there are parts which are not exposed  which could allow the system to become compromised by spammers.

“We aren’t sharing all of the rules and logic that we run with our implementation of the TypePad AntiSpam engine. We are open sourcing the core engine, allowing others to build on top of our system allowing them to build and operate their own spam service.”

The self learning system has already been adopted by the likes of ProBlogger who recently asked his readers to report any problems, and as of writing this there seemed to be very little. Time will tell, having an alternative option is always a necessity with software. This blog will however be sticking to a proven winner – Akismet, who has of today prevented 30,151 pieces of spam.