How does one go about blogging? Well, first read Poles Apart Design’s article What is a Blog? Why Should I Blog? Who Blogs? This article should especially help you in deciding if you should blog and why. Now that you’ve decided to blog, you want to know how to go about it. Well, here’s a somewhat comprehensive list on how to blog:
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So you’ve decided to transfer your free WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog and you have no idea which web host is needed for your blog. Well, picking a web host for your WordPress blog is like picking your web host for a regular website in most ways. You just have to know how much space you need, what kind of scripts and tools you’ll need and so forth for your WordPress blog to work. Now, you’re probably asking, “How am I supposed to know what I need for my blog?” Well, there are only three requirements for self-hosting your WordPress blog:

• PHP version 4.2 or greater
• MySQL version 4.0 or greater
• The latest version of WordPress.org to install on your web host’s server downloadable here

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Here are a few WordPress plugins you may find helpful in giving your WordPress blog some added functionality:

RelatedPosts provides a variety of options for displaying posts that are related through tags.

TextMe sends a carbon-copy of all admin emails sent via SMS to your cell phone.

Video Embedder makes it easy to embed videos from various sources, such as YouTube and Google Video.

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The following are three new WordPress themes I think you’ll love:

Longhorn

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It’s always a good thing to give your blog readers as many options as possible to subscribe to your blog. RSS feed and email are the most common. But how about letting them subscribe using their mobile devices like a PDA.

You’ve got a couple of options. For one, there are a couple of WordPress plugins that can make your posts viewable on a mobile device:

WordPress PDA Plugin: WordPress PDA plugin enables the wordpress blog viewable for PDA browsers. It is really simple plugin which detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. The plugin comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme with all the functionality of wordpress theme.

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In Part 4, Episode 2 of Our Love Affair With WordPress, we chose the Harmony WordPress theme as our template for Perfect Fit, our fictional bra-fitting business. Again, bearing in mind that Perfect Fit is an unusual business, the theme layout is standard but we want to add a little something extra to make it special. In Episode 1 you learned what steps to take to create your ideal blog or website. At this stage, we’ve already decided on the tone or mood of the website, the layout and navigation. And now we have a theme on which to recreate our ideal structure and navigation before setting the mood. The next step now is editing your theme so that the layout is exactly what you planned before dressing it up in something sexy.

The Harmony theme is almost the ideal layout for Perfect Fit. Only a few things need to be moved around or added:
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In the last installment of Our Love Affair with WordPress we discussed blog design in all its glory and step by step. You learned that design is more than the way the blog looks, it’s also the way a blog is structured. Now, let’s assume you’ve followed the first three steps in the seven steps to blog design in Episode 1: you’ve defined the purpose of your site, set goals, have a mood in mind and have developed an information architecture (structure and navigation) that’s ideal for your site. Now it’s time to put it all together using WordPress as your content management system.

You can approach creating your blog in two ways: 1. Use and modify one of hundreds of free themes available at the official WordPress themes site themes.wordpress.net, or other unofficial but equally wonderful sites like WordPress Themes, WordPress Theme Park or visit Using Themes at WordPress.org for a non-exhaustive list of sites with free WordPress themes you can download; or 2. Visit WordPress’s Stepping into Templates page on how to create your own theme from scratch.
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The following are plugins that I think all WordPress blogs should have to make your blog ideally functional:

Aksimet and Spam Karma 2: Aksimet is the great default spam killer that comes with every installation of WordPress. Spam Karma 2 is an additional essential plugin that not only gives your blog extra security and you more piece of mind, you also have the option of sending yourself a digest of spam stats, or you can just check the stats and modify many settings in the WordPress admin area so you can control more spam the way you need to.

All-in-One SEO Pack or, Add Meta Tags and SEO Title Tags: SEO is essential for your WordPress blog if you want search engines to find your blog.

WordPress Database Backup: You should definitely backup your database as often as possible and this plugin gives you the option to do so by either downloading it your computer, emailing to yourself or saving it on your server, hourly, daily or weekly. [Read more →]