‘Tis the Season for all the family mania. Who’s doing what, when, where and how. Thanksgiving is fast approaching and Christmas will be just around the corner, then New Year’s. Many of you are in the midst of planning where you’ll be spending the Holidays and with whom and for how long. Phone calls, email lists, letters, cards, yadda, yadda. Why not step into this new generation of online communication. Blogs, Forums and Social Networks are ideal for staying in touch, planning and updating family members and friends from across the globe, especially during the Holidays.

Think about it: events happen all the time; times and places are always changing; you often live in different cities, states, countries and continents; and when it comes to keeping in touch, we’re all a bit lazy and avoiding phone calls is a staple of being a part of any family (blood or non-blood related). Not to mention, your phone bills may decrease dramatically. You can love talking on the phone, but there are those certain friends and family members who simply do not. Enter the Internet. Emails are great, but they can get unruly when trying to plan trips, events and so forth. Enter, blogs, forums and networks.

Wikipedia.org defines Web 2.0 as “a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing between users.” Gibberish? Yes. Forget the jargon. Web 2.0 is is simply a new wave of using the Internet for users to get what they want and need in a more dynamic way that promotes interacting with other people on the Web. More important, this new age of the Internet is about developing mutually beneficial relationships between users and website owners, users and users, website owners and website owners, etc. Remember the days of static, non dynamic one-way interactions with websites where you searched, found, read and moved on with your web surfing? Well, they’re gone, even if you are still using Internet Explorer. Now, you have a hell of a lot more options and have a hell of a lot more control over how much or how little you can receive, share and contribute to websites, and blogs. You even, on some level, have more choices with how much advertisement you get exposed to. That alone is reason enough to embrace this new Internet age. The most appealing aspect of Web 2.0, the current generation of all things web is the perpetual interactivity and interconnectedness of users to the site creators and the content created. It’s like the wild west, digitized and Digged.

Another installment of cool sites to visit:

Tubetorial: Tubetorial is a great new website that shows video tutorials on web development tips and ticks of all kinds and how to do this and that on WordPress. It’s a great site for us visual learners. It’s quite easy to navigate and find videos. Tubetorial is also a new site so they’re building their inventory. You can also sign up for an rss feed or get the latest tips and tricks via email. Damn I love the web!

Last time on “Our Love Affair With WordPress” you learned about blog content. You learned that good content is relevant, engaging, mostly free, cites sources, should contain visuals and ultimately reflects you or your business. So, let the courting continue with the pretty stuff, design. The allure of WordPress is its seemingly infinite capacity to change its looks from one blog to another, keeping things fresh and interesting for designers and visitors alike. The WordPress publishing platform is the blog designers wet dream because it is so flexible, open, and capable of creating a look as simple a look as Simpla to a more involved design like Alexified. Before we continue, I’d like to make sure we’re all on the same page about what design means in the blog (and website) design world. Design means structure, look, navigation and technology, not just the look of a blog. Savvy?

So, back for more? Couldn’t resist, huh? Well, let’s get started then. Friday, we went over the The Essentials of Blogging and talked about how content, categorizing (including archiving) and commenting are the main staples of blogging. A blog exists for content and sociability for the most part. The goal of any blogger should be to make your blog as interesting to read as possible and that promotes interactivity (usually through commenting and often also through sharing and bookmarking, which we’ll cover later). Your content must also be categorized in such a way your readers know where to look for articles on a given topic or maybe even a specific article. Category listings, archiving and tag clouds are the most common methods of effective and simple ways to organize your blog articles without confusing or frustrating your readers.

Though categorizing and commenting are essential, content is king. More importantly, your written content is king and executioner. A blog is nothing without good content and everything with it. More to the point, good content is what brings in readership. Relevant content creates a following. Crappy content kills a blog.

When I took online courses at Sessions.edu, my friends and family looked at me cross eyed like they couldn’t understand how that could work. They also couldn’t understand how I could pay money for classes at a school with no actual physical location. Well, Sessions does have a corporate office, just no classrooms or faculty lounges. Fortunately I learned a long time ago to ignore the neigh sayers and do what I need to do to get where I need to go. I also learned that times have changed, and our methods of learning should change too. Plus, it’s not like I had a clone of myself lying around to take courses for me in the afternoons while I worked. Though online schools and courses are offered on every corner of the Internet, it still raises eyebrows and contorts faces. And even though, I can readily admit that being in a class room is preferable, I really benefited from taking courses online through Sessions and later, Academy of Art in San Francisco. You’re forced to pay attention, and heaven forbid, read! You’re forced to take initiative. And, you set your own pace, for the most part.

On Wednesday’s discussion Our Love Affair With WordPress: Part 1 - A WordPress Overview, we gave you a few essential links to visit on getting intimate with WordPress. Hope you and WordPress have bonded a bit. If you have and are already convinced that blogging with WordPress is ideal for you, contact Poles Apart Design to help you get your blog up and running. Otherwise, it’s time to take a step back and review the Essentials of Blogging on WordPress. The main thing to note is that WordPress’s self-hosted blogging platform is fast, light and extremely customizable. From a theme as basic as Kubrick to one as feature rich as Revolution, you can go from creating a personal blog that is a simple log for your thoughts to a robust community or business blog with a lot of content, advanced sociability functions and seemingly endless means of categorizing and archiving all content. Remember, a blog is just a regularly updated journal or chronicle of articles and other bits of information such as images and links, published as web pages. And with WordPress, you can create many, many ways to organize, archive and display your articles and bits of information in chronological or discontinuous order. Its up to you.

So before we get into how a WordPress blog works in particular, I’m sure you’d like to know how a typical blog works in general. Well, three main aspects of a blog are: content (and how it’s organized), comments and categorizing. Of course there is more to a blog than these three things, but these three Cs are the basis of blogging.

If it’s not yet obvious, we LOVE WordPress here at the WordPress PAD. We’d marry WordPress if we could, seriously. But alas, it’s not legal and well, sort of gross if you think about it. So, let’s not. Let’s instead focus on how to get the best out of WordPress. Our Love Affair With WordPress is a series we’d like to continue until you cry mercy and tell us enough already, we get it, we give up, we’ll join you in your love lust with WordPress, sheesh…or something like that. We love to blog. We love talking about how we love to blog. It’s a sickness we want no cure for.

First thing’s first. What is WordPress? Well, it’s a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Gibberish? Not really. But, to put it simply, WordPress is a very, very, very good and free blog publishing platform. What’s a blog? A blog is a regularly updated journal or chronicle of articles and other bits of information such as images and links, published as web pages. What makes WordPress a superior blog publishing platform is that it is free, user-friendly and the web designer and developers dream because it’s easy (and fun) to customize. This benefits blog readers too since many plugins can be used by many people creating a more dynamic and social blogosphere.