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 →]

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 →]