Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 294

tip
remember, not all plug-ins for blog packages are created equal.
some plug-ins are created by the company that created the
software, while others are created by third parties. be cautious of
the third-party ones. try to stick to third-party plug-ins that are
recommended or at least acknowledged by the creators of the
blog software for which they are intended.
WordPress
WordPress (wordpress.org) is the blog sotware on which I currently run
ResearchBuzz and other sites. I have fallen in love with it over time. Some
of its features are a little hard to grasp at irst, and you'll probably have
to do a lot of experimenting before you understand the available Web site
templates and WordPress's formatting language. Once you have that all in
hand, though, you'll be amazed at what you can do.
Pricing. WordPress is an open source project and it's free, though it does
accept donations.
Installing. Because WordPress is free, it's free for hosting companies to
install on their Web sites. For that reason, you may ind that your hosting
service has the option to do a “one-click install” of WordPress. If it does,
take advantage of it! It'll save you a whole lot of trouble. If it doesn't, you can
download an installation document that'll take you through several steps.
One of the steps involves creating a database within which WordPress holds
its information. It's not quite a ten-minute install, but it's pretty quick.
Features. WordPress ofers a “dashboard” of tools across the top of the page.
Notice that in addition to providing a place to post your blog information
and create an entry ( Figure 14.7 ), you also have a place to post “pages”—
information relevant to your site but separate from your blog.
Examples of pages you might put here are information about you/your
institution/your company, an overview of your project, and feedback forms.
here's also a place where you can make link lists (links in several difer-
ent categories), create users, and manage comments. Everything is fairly
straightforward except the WordPress “hemes”—those templates that
determine what the pages look like. he default theme isn't bad and there
are many WordPress themes to choose from for the completely non-artistic
among us (that means me!)