What I’ve done so far…
Posted by ergo on April 13th, 2007
I thought of sharing my experiences in maintaining this blog for those of you who are interested in taking up this activity. I chose Wordpress primarily because of it’s good reviews and it’s highly customisable.
Creating your blog
The easiest way to do this is to get a free one at Wordpress.com. The way I did it was by installing and configuring Wordpress Blog Tool on a paid web hosting space.
Customisation
Once you’ve created your blog, you can start customising by choosing a theme. When I first started out I was using the default Wordpress theme and I soon got tired of it. The current theme is called WP-Andreas09 . There are lots of free wordpress themes around and I’m sure you will spend a lot of time choosing one.
Then you install plugins to add more features to your blog. I’ve added the sidebar widget plugin as I found it very useful. I’ve also installed the Category Cloud Widget, which is similar to the “Popular Tags” used in Multiply, and also in FlickR.
I also used a free site tracker from StatCounter.com to check my blog’s stats.
Maintenance
You can routinely check for new themes and plugins to use. Just check the “Wordpress Plugins” in the sidebar for plugins used in this blog. If you installed Wordpress yourself, you would also need to upgrade the software occasionally, especially if the new version has got security fixes. I upgraded from 2.0.5 to 2.1.2 just recently. Note that there is always a risk of plugins and themes breaking when you upgrade.