10/12/06 13:55

Confessions of a former ex-blogger or how I ended up here

by Josep M. Ganyet

Posted in Blogosphere, Design, Mobility, SEO | 8 Comments » Tweet This Post

Back again! (And about time too!)
Finally I got my blog up and running again. Big changes in the house.

Wordpress vs Expression Engine

First and foremost I use Wordpress instead of Expression Engine as a CMS. Expression Engine is great for blogging but the power of open source, the huge community behind Wordpress and the ease of use allowing for hackability and plugin development of WP made the decision easy.

Spam

Spam bots and comment abusers where of great help too. I didn’t realize that my blog was so popular (if I’m to judge by amount of spam I was getting lately) but truth is that I couldn’t cope with that much junk. Let’s hope that the combination of WP and Akismet spam filter plugin beat the spammers this time.

Semantic markup and SEO

Semantic markup, SEO and simple CSS were also an issue. I was looking for a blog design that was optimized for search engines (SEO), easy to manage and where graphic design didn’t take precedence over contents. Derek Punsalan did a great job and all the design credit goes to him. It’s a great template that leaves room to content customization and semantic markup. A few WP plugins, some programming and some tweaking and hacking did the rest.

Tags and tagclouds

Another must have for any blog web nowadays is information tagging, not just for the beauty of tagclouds but for its SEO aspects. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WP by Christine Davis is an application in itself and I woudn’t be surprised if it were integrated in the next WP release. Possibilites are endless. If you navigate my tags you’ll see that you’re allowed to do advanced tag selection by means of logical “and” / “or” of tags.

RSS feeds everywhere

RSS feeds are cool with its nice rounded orange icons. But they’re useful too. I hardly visit some webs that I’m subscribed to and I read in Netvibes. I created feeds for all the entries, individual categories, tags and logical operations between tags.

Photoblog and mobloging

And last but not least there’s the Photoblog. It integrates with my Flickr photoblog where I post the pictures I take on the go with my mobile phone. I can be a Moblogger too! Sweet.

It took me a while to put everything together. A few design trials that will never see the light and a quite a few cycles of coding and debugging are to blame. Ah and some real work too.

If you have opinions, suggestions or find any bug please let me know.
Enjoy!

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