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. [Read more →]

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. [Read more →]

Today is Blog Action Day and so we at Poles Apart will give homage to the environment by bringing to your attention sites from across the web that are Earth-friendly:

EcoArt sells earth friendly non-toxic art supplies that are safe for you and the environment.

Blackle is a Google search engine that saves energy because its background is predominantly black. Of course, this isn’t necessarily true since the energy saved from using a black background instead of a white one is minimal. However, the creator, Toby Heap, says making the web page black reminds people about the importance of saving energy an protecting our environment. That’s good enough for me. [Read more →]

I came across a couple of articles at SCIAM and TechCrunch about Zlango, a new Israeli company that created a new language and associated application for SMS (short message sending) or, what we call text-messaging. The language is based on icons like Yahoo! smilies where each icon stands for a word so you can form picture sentences and send them to people via cell phones. Zlango has now created online picture messaging. Zlango Composer is a Flash based translator that translates what you type on your keyboard into Zlango’s picture language. Your messages can be sent to an email address or shared via community sites. Zlango’s zMess also lets you share your picture messages on your private blog or the public blog at the site. Anyway, this new language got me wondering, how do we effectively communicate on the web? The SCIAM article mentioned Zlango was not yet as rich as Esperanto, a universal lanugage that is apparently spoken by over two million people across the world and was founded by a Polish physician in 1887. Have you heard of this? Where have I been? Anyway, this Esperanto got me thinking even more about the problem of effective communication online. What problem? We take for granted that Internet users have the same habits offline that they do online. Seriously, we do. [Read more →]

I found a couple of cool websites sites recently that I’d love to share with y’all. <—-Yes, I know that’s not a word.

Happy Webbies: I love all things contrary. I especially love things that are both adorable and sarcastic, like Jim Benton’s It’s Happy Bunny books and merchandise. So, I was pleasd to discover this morning, a British take on the Bunny series called Happy Webbies. You can download 4 posters of cartoonized web design gurus Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, John Hicks and Jeremy Keith, all Brits, with funny webbie puns. Why, would I want to, you ask. Well, perhaps it’s time to give that desktop wallpaper of a topless Jake Gyllenhaal (scuse me while I catch my breath) or a scantily clad Jessica Alba, a rest. Just a thought. [Read more →]