Create a smart blog

Take your blog to the next level with our guide to adding comment tools, templates and more

Setting up a blog is easy. Anyone looking for a platform to air their views can quickly create a free journal with the likes of Blogger and Live Journal. However, while these and similar services are perfectly acceptable tools they do have limitations.

For those wanting a greater degree of control over a blog, it makes sense to start from scratch with an SQL-based tool.

One such is Wordpress and in this Masterclass we’re going to reveal not only how to get a blog up and running, but also how to benefit from more advanced features, such as trackbacks and pingbacks, which allow other people to let you know when they respond to your blog posts on another site.

So, if you fancy turning an ordinary blog into an extraordinary one, read on. Do remember, though, our Masterclasses are for those wanting a challenge.

Hosted webspace and FTP
For this Masterclass we’ll assume you already have some hosted web space available that supports SQL databases. More specifically, before getting started with a self-hosted Wordpress blog, check the host supports PHP 4.2 or higher and MySQL 4.0 or higher ­ configuring the necessary MySQL database is one of the first steps to getting up and running. Intimate knowledge of SQL is not necessary, though, as much of the Wordpress installation is automated.

Make sure that a database has been set up on your web space and make a note of the username and password. Aside from these requirements, the only other thing needed is an FTP tool to upload files. Technically, FTP uploading can be achieved with nothing more than Windows but it’s a bit tricky. Better to download a decent FTP program, such as Filezilla).

Uploading Wordpress
Download the latest version of Wordpress from our website. Extract the compressed file that has been downloaded, rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and use a text editor such as Notepad to open it for editing.

In the third line of the file, replace the word ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with the name of the SQL database that has been created on your hosted web space. It is important to leave the single quotes in place. In the fourth line replace the word ‘usernamehere’ with the database username and on the next line replace ‘yourpasswordhere’ with the necessary password.

With all this done, save and close the file and then use an FTP program to upload the entire contents of the extracted ‘wordpress’ folder, including the three folders it contains, to the top-level folder of your site.

Open a browser window and type in your website address followed by /wp-admin/install.php (so the full address would be something like www.mysite.co.uk/wp-admin/install.php). If an error message appears, check the database information mentioned earlier has been correctly entered to the wp-config.php file. It may be necessary to change the sixth line of this file (the ‘localhost’ part), according to how your host requires a connection to be established with a database, though it can usually be left as is.

Once a connection has been established, the Wordpress installation wizard will appear. Enter a name for the blog along with a contact email address and then click Install Wordpress. Make a note of the username and password generated and click the ‘log in’ link.

Getting started
The first thing to do is to change the administration password to something more memorable, so click the My Profile link in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Scroll down to the Update Your Password section, enter and confirm a password and click the Update Profile button.

Before creating blog posts, there are many ways to customise Wordpress. Head to the Options section of the blog’s administration pages and use the General tab to configure basic options, such as the name and URL of the blog, along with date and time formatting. The options available on the Writing and Reading tabs should be fairly self-explanatory, perhaps with the exception of the Update Services section.

By default, whenever a new blog post is made, Wordpress will automatically notify the Ping-O-Matic service, which tells selected other sites when an update or addition has been made to your site (see www.pingomatic.com for more on this).

If this is not required, clear the text box at the bottom of the Writing tab and click Update Options. Alternatively, additional notification services can be added to the list to help increase blog exposure ­ a list of services can be found at http://codex.word press.org/Update_Services.

Getting people to visit a blog can be one of the hardest steps. A common strategy to attract visitors is to link to an existing popular blog and ask for a reciprocal link in return ­ blogging friends can prove useful here.

Wordpress features a ‘blogroll’ ­ essentially a list of links ­ that appears in a sidebar and can be easily customised. Move to the Manage Blogroll tab of the Blogroll tab and a list of default blog links will be displayed. This can be edited as required by clicking the associated Edit link, or deleted by clicking Delete. Use the Add Link tab to add custom links and the Categories tab to help keep them organised in groups.

Handling comments
By default, blog posts are open to comments from visitors to the site, so a degree of management may be required. Move to the Options section and click the Discussion tab. It is possible to block all comments by unticking the third box.

In the lower portion of the page, control can be exerted over who can post comments. Moderation can be enabled to help prevent spam and the requirement to fill out a name and email address offers another safety net. Below this, opt to force comments that contain a particular number of URLs to be automatically held back for moderation ­ an email notification will be sent out by default. The Comment Blacklist box can be used to block comments that include specific words, email addresses or URLs, or have been sent from a particular IP address.

Trackbacks are a way to show people when you’ve written a response to something on their blog ­ this can be used as a valuable publicity tool. Pingbacks work in very much the same way with less information sent to the other blog. Trackbacks and pingbacks can be enabled on the Discussion tab. When writing a post of your own that replies to a blog post elsewhere, scroll down the page and expand the Trackbacks section. Enter the address of the website that is referenced in the post before publishing.

Extending a Wordpress blog
If publicity is desirable, the use of social-networking sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us can bring in loads of readers. Many blogs include links to allow visitors to submit blog posts to such social-networking services and these can be manually included with individual posts by pasting in some HTML code provided by the site in question.

However, adding such links manually can be time consuming. In Wordpress, it can be automated using the Bookmark widget from http://darxr.net/ wp-bookmark-widget. Full details of how to configure this add-on can be found in the walkthrough on the next page. This widget is just one of the many add-ons available for Wordpress, and being a widget rather than a plug-in means it can be quickly and easily placed into Wordpress’ sidebar without the need to edit any code.

Ordinary plug-ins, on the other hand, can add extra features to any part of a blog, either from the point of view of the visitor or behind the scenes for the editor. For a list of available plug-ins, visit the official directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins.

Perhaps the best place to start browsing through some of the available widgets is at the Wordpress Widgets blog (http://widgets.wordpress.com). Before installing a widget, a widget-compatible theme (page template) must be in use, and this information is generally provided in a theme’s description.

It is sometimes possible to convert an ordinary theme into one that is widget friendly, as well as making a standard plug-in into a widget. This can be quite an involved process and requires the php pages that make up a theme to be edited. Full information on how to proceed can be found at http://automattic.com/code/widgets.

Changing the look and feel
While it is possible to manually edit configuration files to change the look of a blog, a far easier option is to turn to one of the themes available. These work in much the same way as plug-ins and widgets ­ they just need to be uploaded to the relevant folder (or ‘directory’, as they’re often referred to) and activated. The Wordpress Theme Viewer on the Wordpress site.

Like many other theme-download sites, here it is possible to home in on a particular style of theme by indicating how many columns are required, where sidebars should be located, whether themes are widget-enabled (ie, can handle widgets ­ a definite bonus), what colours are wanted and much more.
After locating something suitable, download the theme, extract the files and then upload them to the
wp-content/themes folder of your Wordpress installation, being careful to preserve the folder structure and ensuring the theme is uploaded to its own folder within ‘themes’.

After the transfer, head to the administration section of the blog and click the Presentation link. A preview of all available themes should be displayed ­ click the one you want and it will be immediately activated. Click the ‘View site’ link to check how everything looks. There is no limit, except web space availability, to the number of themes that can be installed, but obviously only one can be active at a time. Having several installed makes it easy to change your blog’s look with a few mouse clicks.

Blog slog
There’s no denying blogging can be great fun and can be used as an alternative to creating a website in the more traditional sense. The beauty of Wordpress is its incredible flexibility ­ it can be tailored to suit the look of an existing site, or made to look great in its own right. Once up and running, you may want to investigate some of the other built-in options of Wordpress, such as configuring the blog for membership (just head to the Options section of the admin panel). Do take a look at some of the many available plug-ins, too. The highly configurable nature of Wordpress means there is virtually no limit to what can be achieved and the level of customisation that can be applied.

Shopping for blogs
There is a huge number of blogging tools and services to choose from. If no suitable hosted web space is available, Wordpress can also be used as an online service. Pay a visit to www.wordpress.com to sign up for a free account which includes 3GB of storage space. Google’s Blogger and Livejournal work in a similar way, but do not offer the same level of control as a manually configured blog.

Other blogs you can host and run yourself include Typepad and Movable Type. The latter is free and can be seen as a complete content-management system (or CMS) that includes a blogging facility. Like Wordpress, both offer a huge level of control over any site that is set up.

See our step-by-step guide on how to add widgets to a hosted Wordpress blog