cre8d design

Mark has created an initial helpful guide to integrating Wordpress and Vanilla. If you haven’t come across Vanilla, it’s a wonderful free open-source forum system. (See my reflections on switching to Vanilla.)

In short this is what the tutorial gets you to do:

1. Install Wordpress and Vanilla; make them use the same database.
2. Add come lines of code (template provided) to your Vanilla configuration file to force Vanilla to use Wordpress’ usernames/passwords.
3. Alter the Wordpress’ user table in the database by adding in the fields Vanilla has for its users.
4. Create a Vanilla file which does the checking to see whether people are logged in or not with Wordpress. (Code provided.)
5. Add some lines to your Vanilla settings.

You can now log in using Wordpress or Vanilla and use both the blog and forum. He also discusses where new users should sign up and warns that it’s a first tutorial and shouldn’t be used on live sites just yet.

While it’s rather technical and fiddley, this is one of the common topics which comes up time and time again over at the Vanilla forums - and one of the popular requests I get. This new guide addresses the second method I discussed earlier this year when one wants to have both a blog and forum running on a site.

I’ve been working on my screencasting skills (thanks to BB Flashback) and am going to unveil my (strong?) kiwi accent shortly with a screencast tutorial which I’m planning to record very soon (Sunday?). In the first “get up to speed with Wordpress” tutorial I’m planning on covering how to set up your blog:

1. Installing a free FTP program and connecting to your website
2. Creating a database for Wordpress.
3. Installing Wordpress.
4. Configuring Wordpress settings.
5. Setting up permalinks.
6. Writing a post.
7. Uploading images.
8. Creating a blog roll (list of links).
9. Setting up an about page.
10. Setting up a contact page with a contact form.
11. Setting up spam protection.
12. Adding a stats counter.
13. Setting up a back up system.
14. Setting up Feedburner and making sure all feed traffic goes through it.
15. Showing your delicious links on your blog.
16. Showing your Flickr photos on your blog.
17. Adding Adsense Ads to your blog.
18. Finding other plugins to install.
19. Adding a tag cloud to your blog.
20. Removing the meta tag information from the sidebar.
21. Finding new themes and switching to a new theme.

Is there anything else (aside from designing a theme which isn’t the topic of this screencast) that would be handy this screencast which would get you up and running with a blog with the standard sorts of things people need/want? Is there anything I should remove because it’s not a core thing people want to know about when setting up their blog?

I just visited a new Web 2.0 photo sharing site and saw a front page list of things you can do such with high up on the list: “Tag your photos!” Gee, is tagging that high up on people’s wish lists? I just spent some time organising the 750 or so (physical) photos we took while in South America (digital versions on Flickr) - it was a fun job and brought back recent memories as I sat cross-legged on our lounge floor.

Organising them on Flickr was as simple as putting them into albums (”sets”) for different parts of our trip. I started by bulk tagging photos (”South America”, “Peru”, …) but gave up quickly. I realised I wasn’t going to need those tags - I was just going to jump to an album and look through the set of photos until I found the one I wanted. Besides, I took about 80 photos of Machu Picchu (oops!) and they’d all be tagged the same. I’d need to look at them to figure out the exact one I wanted. In a sense, the albums were acting as my tags, I didn’t need anything further.

Tagging can be incredibly useful (e.g. for delicious) but often the tags slow me down from what I’m wanting to be doing - like one of those sign-up forms where I have to enter in lots of information before joining. If there’s no future value in the tags - or I can’t imagine one, I’m not interested in tagging them. Ok, so maybe I won’t have many people discovering my photos by accident on Flickr, but that’s not what they’re there for.

I just hope Web 2.0 applications don’t get caught up in tagging (because someone said it’s cool) and focus on features people need, problems which need solutions.

I’ve been pondering this thought recently. In the world of blogging, most bloggers I come across are desperate to find the latest tips and tricks to attract new people to their blog and rapidly increase their traffic (and revenue) and that’s completely fine.

But the blogs (and sites) which get the most traffic aren’t necessarily the ones with the newest ideas or the most insight. There’s so many gems out there in largely undiscovered blogs which plod along with very little traffic.

So why don’t they give up? Their writers simply enjoy writing and sharing their thoughts with the world. Popularity isn’t vital to them - in fact, when they become popular overnight (thanks to Digg or delicious), they’re often not ready to handle everyone criticising their thoughts and opinions or aren’t sure how to manage the flood of emails and comments from people.

The blogosphere is a little like high school. A lot of people spend all their time wanting to be popular, trying to get into the “it” crowd, spending so much energy and heartache on the goal - even going to the extreme of changing themselves to be more like the popular crowd. Others are OK with a smaller group of close friends, where they can be themselves, have fun and enjoy life.

Someone I know writes a personal blog and once wrote us an email saying not to give out the address to just anyone - they wanted to keep it to close family and friends. I smiled to myself and wondered why they started a blog. But, a year later, it’s one of the blogs I wanted to most read when I got back from holiday.

Another I know was happy with a small, slowly growing close group of commenters who they had good relationships with and then found their blog was linked up by a major player somehow and bam! The dynamic was disturbed by party crashers and things were never quite the same again. The secret was out and the blog’s sudden popularity changed the author, changed the tone of the blog permanently.

I’ve had different blogs become popular for one reason or another overnight and because I’m not the biggest fan of crowds (I’m happy speaking to one but trying to mix and mingle in a crowd of strangers at a party isn’t something which energises me) I found the experiences to be rather exhausting (even if the feedback is positive). Dealing with the rush of emails and comments is usually something I hope will die down reasonably quickly. I’m happy not to be popular, to fly just below the radar.

I honestly think that it’s OK to fly just under the radar and not to be popular straight away when you start a blog. It rarely happens. But sometimes I see people working so hard on being popular or having popular people link up to you and sing your praises that I wonder if they’d still blog for the love of blogging and not just for the love of a (paying) audience.

(*Of course, blogging where income is the primary objective brings with it certain pressures but most small businesses take a long time and hard work to get up off the ground. Good things take time.)

I personally like the ebb and flow of visitors to this blog. I don’t feel pressured to keep it up - I’d rather write when I’m inspired to write than write to a schedule (or write to say sorry for why I haven’t been blogging). Lately, I’ve been thinking about secretly starting some blogs I’d love to write about and I’d be happy writing even if no-one came along except a few of my friends every so often. If you’re thinking about starting a blog and the thought of no-one visiting for quite some time doesn’t bother you either, go for it

Oh - and who knows how useful and popular your posts might be in the future? Your blog might be a treasure trove to someone one day.