Tag Archives: wordpress

blogging

Tips for Using WordPress as a Corporate Blogging Platform

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There are some big advantages to using a single blogging platform for all of your corporate blogging activities. In this case, I’m going to talk about how to use a single WordPress installation as your corporate blog, but similar tips probably apply to other platforms. Keep in mind that these tips are for corporate blogs, not individual bloggers.

Advantages

  • Gives people a single place to find blogs from the various groups or people within your organization.
  • Take advantage of having all of this together on your domain to get better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your corporate website. Having blogs on sites like blogspot.com will probably have a negative impact on your SEO as people create links to content that is off your domain.
  • Centralized management of the blogs to make it easier for people to blog while maintaining branding that is consistent with your corporate branding guidelines.
  • You have one WordPress installation, but it can look like a single unified blog with multiple topic areas or it can look like multiple blogs depending on how you want to position it.

Tips for using WordPress

  • In most cases, you should be hosting it yourself using the WordPress.org download, and integrate it into the rest of your online presence.
  • Replace the built-in feeds with Feedburner feeds to get better analytics on your subscribers and don’t forget to integrate your analytics package to track traffic on your blog.
  • Use WordPress categories to separate the different topics into channels and allow people to subscribe to specific topics using the built-in category feeds to create Feedburner feeds.
  • Use full names as author’s display names and allow people to subscribe to specific people using the built-in author feeds to create Feedburner feeds.
  • Go easy on the plugins. As you add more plugins, the stability and performance will usually start to degrade, and you can end up with conflicts between plugins that generate strange behaviors. In general, if you can do what you need to do with a couple of lines of PHP, don’t use a plugin. For example, I always embed the Feedburner feeds and Google Analytics in the PHP header and footer files, instead of using plugins for those functions.
  • Use themes to make your blog look unique and to highlight high profile authors or important categories.

Webtrends Example

Webtrends is one of the best examples of using existing WordPress functionality to create a really great blog. All of the main functionality they are using is built into WordPress, but they have done some extensive design work on the theme to make it look unique.

http://blogs.webtrends.com/

  • Featured articles at the top of the page provide focus and highlight important blog posts.
  • Focused topics: Inside Webtrends, Best Practices, and Industry News. Behind the scenes, they are using categories to create channels or sub-blogs based on topics. Notice how you can get a feed for just a particular topic or for the entire blog.
  • Recent Posts: All of the most recent posts regardless of the category.

http://www.webtrends.com/blogs

This is just another view of the same blog as above, but it is focused on their executive bloggers using authors instead of categories to display posts (and feeds) for each of their executives. You might use something like this if you had a couple of high profile people blogging for your company.

  • The main blog is linked at the top.
  • The most recent post for each executive along with an RSS feed is displayed.

While they are using the default functionality in WordPress, they have some extensive work on the theme / design to make it look the way it does. However, the categories, users, and feeds are all built-in functionality existing in WordPress.

Summary

This blog post assumes that you’ve already selected WordPress, so I tried to focus on just a few tips, but there are many, many more tips for corporate blogging and using WordPress.

However, it is important to spend some time upfront thinking about your goals for the blog and the strategic topics that you want to be the focus of your blogging efforts. After you have your goals and strategy defined, then you should start thinking about picking a blogging platform and getting started.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

OpenID

New and Slightly Improved

I finally had some time this weekend to work on a bunch of things that I have been wanting to do with my blog. The short status is:

  • WordPress 2.5 / K2 Upgrades = Success
  • Administration Improvements = Success
  • hCard = Success
  • OpenID delegation = Success
  • OpenID plugin for comments = Fail

WordPress 2.5

The biggest task was the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 (2.5.1 really). I’ve been putting this off partly because it is a lot of work for me and partly because I had to wait for K2 official support for WordPress 2.5, which was released a couple of weeks ago. I played around with some nightly builds before that, but none of them seemed as stable as I would have liked, so I decided to wait for official support.

The reason it takes so much time for the upgrade is that I’ve done a bit of hacking on the php files for K2 without doing much documentation, so it took me a while to sort out what I had changed. I also took the time in this version to carefully comment begin / end statements using a consistent search string. Now, for the next big upgrade, I can easily search the files for that string to find all of my tweaks.

I also had to do a bit of work on my custom css overrides in a few places where K2 made new changes.

Luckily, I have a pretty good setup on my MacBook with a local php/mysql/wordpress install where I can do most of the testing, breaking, and fixing without disrupting the blog, so the blog should have been up most of the morning despite my working on it for 6+ hours.

Administration Improvements

I installed the WordPress Database Backup (wp-db-backup), and scheduled weekly backups. My hosting provider does nightly backups, but I thought it would be a good idea to have my own backups. It will also make it easier for me to do backups prior to installing plugins / upgrades / etc., which I have been doing manually prior to installing the plugin.

I also used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to perform the upgrades. I love this plugin!

hCard

I really needed to get some proper contact information on my blog, and I decided that hCard would be a good way to do it, and it gave me an excuse to play with microformats. Now, people can see my contact info, machines can read it, and you can add it to your address book with a simple click.

OpenID delegation

I finally got around to setting up Fast Wonder Blog as a delegate for my OpenID account at ClaimID. Not having this earlier was sheer laziness on my part.

OpenID plugin for comments

Grrrrr. OK, this one was a big fail for me. I tried a bunch of stuff, but I kept running into one pesky error that was not occurring in my local environment. I installed wp-openid, and it worked great in my local environment, but on my hosted production copy of the blog, I kept getting this:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: error() in /home/content/f/a/s/fastwonderblog/html/wp-content/plugins/openid/store.php on line 134

I tried commenting out the error to rule out an issue with the error message itself, I re-built database tables, uninstalled / reinstalled, activated / deactivated all with no luck. I’m hoping I can get Chris or Will to take a look at the error report and suggest a fix. I’d love to have OpenID support, but it looks like it isn’t in the cards for me today.

barcampportland

BarCampPortland 2008 Recap aka Geeks, Bubble tea, and Werewolf

The days and weeks leading up to BarCamp can be busy and stressful for the organizers as we work through all of the last minute arrangements, but it is so worth it! I had an amazing time at BarCampPortland, and the majority of the feedback has been positive. I won’t go into the gory details about everything that worked / didn’t work, since you can view the full postmortem document online; however, I will cover a few of my impressions of the event.

I love the BarCamp format

I’ve attended a number of BarCamps, and I am finding that I enjoy attending BarCamps more than traditional conferences, and I think I learn more at BarCamps, too. The people who attend BarCamps are smart and engaged. These are the people giving up a weekend to geek out with others over various technologies, not the corporate types who only attend conferences during working hours. We had people attending from as far away as Chicago, Washington D.C., and Alaska. I had amazing conversations, talked to a bunch of very interesting people, and learned about new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Online Communities

I held a community management roundtable session again this year at BarCamp to a packed room. I’ve done a few of these roundtable discussions where I kick off the conversation and let the group take it in different directions while I act as moderator for the group and contribute actively along with the other participants. I’ve done this at Corvallis and Austin BarCamps, but it never works as well as it does here in Portland. In other places, I’ve had to drag the discussion along or manage people who dominate the conversation while contributing little. In Portland, these just work, and I learn as much from the process as the other participants. I have no idea why it works so well here, maybe we are just more community-oriented than some other locations, but I’m glad that the session went so well. If you want to learn more about the topics discussed, you can view the notes from the session on the Drupal site.

WordCamp

We held a mini WordCamp along with BarCamp on Sunday, and there were more great sessions that I wished I could have attended. I learned a lot about WordPress theming, including how to write your own theme from scratch. I doubt that I’ll try it anytime soon, but it did give me a much better understanding about exactly how themes are constructed in WordPress. Aaron Hockley also led a really good discussion about the underlying infrastructure under WordPress.

Painter’s tape is your friend

Painter’s tape makes a great schedule board and can be used to hang really heavy banners without hurting the walls.

Unique Portland Flair

Here are a few things that make our BarCamp very “Portland”:

  • We have Bubble Tea! For the second year in a row, we’ve had bubble tea made to order at BarCampPortland. A big thank you to Six Apart & David Recordon for making it possible.
  • Werewolf games provided us with hours of amusement in the evenings led by the Portland Werewolf group (yes, we meet up to play monthly here in Portland!) We even had a Chicago attendee introduce us to a new variant that proved to be really interesting and challenging!
  • Twitter was a main attraction during the event. Portland has a very active Twitter population, and most people had a Twitter username on their badge. We used Twitter to make announcements, follow up on sessions, and drive most of the communications during the event.
  • We had lots of other entertainment including a wii station, War Games, and more.

More Information

As always, Rick Turoczy has done a great job on Silicon Florist of rounding up the coverage for the event. You can get links to pictures, session notes, and other blog posts from the Silicon Florist BarCamp Portland: The Weekend that was post.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

A huge thank you to the entire organizing team, all of the volunteers, the always helpful Cubespace staff, the attendees and the sponsors who made this event possible and successful. These events do not happen unless people are willing to pitch in and help where it is needed. People were helpful and patient as we recruited from random passers by to help with various tasks.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

barcampportland

Don't Miss BarCampPortland May 2, 3, & 4

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you might not know that we are holding our second annual BarCampPortland this weekend. Here are a few things you should know:

Logistics

Friday, May 2: 6PM-10PM
Saturday, May 3: 9AM-11PM
Sunday, May 4: 9AM-2PM

Location:
CubeSpace
622 SE Grand Ave
Portland, Oregon

The event is completely free, but it would be great if you could RSVP on Upcoming

What is BarCampPortland, and Why Should I Attend?

I think that I did a reasonably good job of explaining this in a Silicon Florist blog post last week: BarCampPortland: Five reasons to attend

But I’m not technical enough to attend …

Bulls**t! All you need to attend BarCampPortland is a passion for technology in some form: as a user of technologies, as a Twitter addict, as a blogger, as a programmer, as a food geek, as a sys admin, as a …

Last year, we had hardcore programming discussions along with conversations about online communities, science fiction, Lost TV show conspiracies, knitting, and so much more. I don’t want people to self-select out of BarCampPortland because they aren’t programmers. I haven’t written code in years, and I’ve been to a bunch of BarCamps (in Portland and elsewhere), and I always feel welcome. BarCamps use the “law of two feet”; if you get to a session and decide that it isn’t useful for you (too technical / not technical enough), you can just get up to walk out and join another discussion.

Twitter

Portland has a huge Twitter community, and we will be using Twitter for updates during the event. Please follow BarCampPortland on Twitter to get real-time updates during the event. We will also have a space on your badge for your twitter name, so if you haven’t yet joined Twitter, now would be a great time!

WordCamp

Are you a WordPress user? If so, you will want to attend the mini-WordCamp running along with BarCampPortland on Sunday. We will also have plenty of other sessions on Sunday, too if WordPress isn’t your thing.

Bubble Tea and Bacon

Let’s just say that I’ve heard rumors about Bubble Tea and Bacon (separately, because together would be yucky). Nothing confirmed and no promises. I’m just sayin’ that I’ve heard some rumors.

Volunteers

We are still looking for volunteers, so if you would like to volunteer, you should contact Raven Zachary.

Just shut up and go already

I had a blast at the event last year, and I expect this year to be even better! Attending BarCampPortland is highly encouraged (and not just because I’m organizing it!) 🙂

blogging

WordPress: Host it Yourself or Host on WordPress.com

I sent someone some advice on WordPress hosting and made the mistake of posting about it on Twitter, which resulted in a couple of requests to blog about it.

I started this blog as the Open Source Culture blog (later renamed the Open Culture blog) on Blogspot.com. Last April, I rebranded the blog as Fast Wonder and moved it to WordPress.com. After a few months, I grew increasingly frustrated with the limitations of WordPress.com, and I moved it to my own hosting provider. Based on this experience, I tend to recommend that most (but not all) people host their own WordPress installations, instead of using WordPress.com.

There are a number of benefits of hosting WordPress on your own domain.

  • You can use a custom feed and have it auto-discovered (I highly recommend the free FeedBurner service). The benefit of a custom feed is that you can move your blog around, rename it, etc. and keep the same FeedBurner feed forever to avoid losing subscribers.
  • You can have a custom favicon on your own host, but on WordPress.com, you are stuck with the WordPress favicon.
  • You can get better analytics (Google analytics are also free) if you host it yourself.
  • You have more control over the theme, since you can hack on the templates files, while you are more limited to just css changes on WordPress.com
  • It also seems like some countries may be blocking all of WordPress.com, so if you do business globally in certain countries this may or may not be important depending on how you use your blog. Thanks to Aaron Hockley for reminding me of this issue.

For people already on WordPress.com, it is pretty easy to migrate to your own host without losing comments, posts, etc. with the WordPress export / import.

There are some potential disadvantages to hosting your own WordPress installation:

  • Hosting it yourself requires a fair amount of technical knowledge to install.
  • You have to keep up with installing the WordPress security updates, which can be a lot more work to maintain.

Yes, I am a big fan of hosting my own WordPress installs; however it really isn’t for everyone. If you aren’t at least roughly familiar with databases and installing PHP applications, I wouldn’t try it yourself. Also, if you have a very small blog and really don’t want to do much customization or spend much time on it, then I would go with WordPress.com and not host it yourself.

There are probably some other advantages and disadvantages, so drop them in the comments if I missed anything.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: