McNulty - Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read

Scott McNulty

Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read

Scott McNulty

Peachpit Press
1249 Eighth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
510/524-2178
510/524-2221 (fax)

Find us on the Web at: www.peachpit.com
To report errors, please send a note to

Peachpit Press is a division of Pearson Education.
Copyright 2009 by Scott McNulty

Executive editor: Clifford Colby
Editor: Kathy Simpson
Production editor: Danielle Foster
Compositor: WolfsonDesign
Indexer: Julie Bess
Cover design: Charlene Charles-Will
Interior design: WolfsonDesign

Notice of Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact .

Notice of Liability

The information in this book is distributed on an As Is basis without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.

Trademarks

WordPress and Akismet are trademarks of Automattic, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services identified throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book.

ISBN-13 978-0-321-59193-7
ISBN-10 0-321-59193-3

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Blogging has brought a tremendous number of fantastic things into my life, but none better than my lovely girlfriend, Marisa. This book is dedicated to Marisa for her patience and support throughout the process of writing the book. I think she might be a keeper.

Scott McNulty is a simple geek living in Philadelphia. Scott has been blogging for just over nine years about whatever strikes his fancy. He runs more WordPress blogs than anyone should and even has a few other blogs using other blogging engines.

More of Scotts words can be found in his personal blog, blog.blankbaby.com; at MacUser.com, where he is a senior contributor; and at Obsessable.com, where he writes a weekly feature about technology.

Lots of smart and talented people worked very hard to make me look good, which is a Herculean task. Thanks to Cliff Colby for making this book happen; to Kathy Simpson for making sure my words were intelligible (any garbled or wrong sections of this book are entirely my responsibility); and the production team of Danielle Foster, WolfsonDesign, and Julie Bess for their help in making a book that Im darned proud of.

Id also like to thank my bosses, Joe Cruz and Dan Alig, for being so flexible with my work schedule as I wrote this book. Not all workplaces would be so accommodating, and Im thankful that I work in such an enlightened place.

Everyone from Martha Stewart to Fortune 500 companies to your 12-year-old niece seems to be blogging nowadays. Blogging has gone from something only the nerdly found themselves doing a few years ago to something that your mother likely knows aboutif she isnt doing it herself.

WordPress has done its part to help spread the allure of blogging by making it very easy to start a blogand to update that blog after its up and running. WordPress isnt the only blogging tool in town. Lots of popular tools are out there, including Movable Type, Tumblr, Habari, and Blogger. Given all these choices, why should you use WordPress?

Check the following sections for the good and the bad about WordPress. To get it out of the way, I start with the bad.

All is not sunshine and fruit punch in the world of WordPress. Using a blogging platform that is engineered like this one has a couple of drawbacks:

Appeal to bad guys. Popularity and an open codebase are generally a good combination, but a few people out there are always looking to ruin everyones fun. Because WordPress runs so many high-profile sites, some nefarious types are on the lookout for flaws that can be exploited. Luckily, the WordPress developers are very quick to patch vulnerabilities, but you have to stay on top of the releases.

Dynamic page generation. WordPress dynamically generates most of the pages that you see. Each time you load a post, a bunch of things are happening in the background: Database queries are fired off, PHP code is executed, and then the page is displayed. Usually, this system isnt a problem; it ensures that the content of your blog is as up to date as possible. But this approach is a little more resource intensive than a static approach and can translate to your blogs being unavailable under heavy load.

Note

Movable Type, the other blogging heavyweight, takes the opposite approach. Movable Type (MT for short) stores posts, comments, and the like in a database just like WordPress does, but it creates static HTML pages from that data. This arrangement makes MT a little leaner when serving up content, but publishing a post can take more time because each index page needs to be rebuilt. MT has added an option to use a dynamic system, but by default, it publishes static pages.

Remember when you were a kid, and you asked your mom if you could do something all the other kids were doing? She replied, If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too? Despite the fact that my friends werent known bridge-jumpers, the advice is clear: Be your own person, and youll be better off in life.

That advice works well as a general life practice, but when youre considering a blogging platform, you want to pick the one that has the most users. Why? Because along with all those users comes some pretty neat stuff, such as an active developer community, a wide range of reference materials, and a large base of people you can turn to for help.

WordPress has all those features in spades. Many of todays most popular blogsincluding TechCrunch, ICanHasCheezburger.com, and The New York Times blogsare powered by WordPress, so you can rest assured that WordPress is capable of handling the traffic generated by your adoring audience.

Furthermore, WordPress can be extended by little bits of code called plug-ins, which I talk about in detail in . Created by members of the WordPress community, plug-ins are often available for free or for a small fee. These plug-ins can make WordPress do all sorts of things it isnt able to do out of the box.

The active plug-in developer community owes its existence in large part to the fact that WordPress is distributed under the GNU General Public License. This license means two things:

WordPress is free.

Youre allowed to alter the code to suit your needs and share your modified code with anyone, so long as you distribute it under the same license (for free and in such a way that others can change your code and share it as well).