Blogging is a mainstream activity. There are many choices of blogging platforms. These include Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. Today I discuss WordPress. My information comes from a book on being a great WordPress designer. I skimmed the table of contents and read the first chapter. So this will be an overview.WordPress is highly customizable. Many content management systems (CMS) advertise customization. However almost everything in WordPress can be customized. This makes for an ultra flexible CMS.
WordPress is an open source product. It is written in the PHP programming language. The WordPress.com sight is a hosted version of WordPress. Therefore you cannot do heavy customization of the product on that sight.
WordPress.org is the home for the open source software. Note that WordPress needs MySQL to run. MySQL is an open source database management system. An important plugin for WordPress is Akismet, which is a spam filter.
Themes are customizations consisting of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. Linkbacks are other sites linking to your page. Linkbacks are also known as pingbacks or trackbacks. The WordPress documentation is called the WordPress Codex. It is available online.
The default WordPress installation comes with same posts. Delete them before your site goes live. I exclusively use Blogger. But I like checking out the competition occasionally.
