Blog setup guide

Voici un ancien article que j’avais redige sur mon blog alors ecrit en anglais. Je pense que l’article peut en interesser certains, et meme s’il date de l’annee derniere, les conseils sont toujours d’actualite. Surtout pour ceux qui ont decide de deployer wordpress sur leur propre espace d’hebergement! Enjoy

Initially written: 2009-05-25 21:23:40

This is the second serious blog that I’m setting up, and I wanted to share the backend applications I use to power it, and a few tricks I found useful.

• WordPress: I use this blogging platform on a private/shared server. Open source. Huge dev community. Stable. Loads of free themes and plugins. Easy to tweak and adapt to your needs. Not much else to say, it’s the best I have tried blogger in the past, but it’s just too frustrating. But if you don’t want to go through the hassle of installing wordpress on a server, you can use wordpress.com and open an account there.

• all in One SEO Pack, Google XML sitemaps: to improve my natural search indexation, I use those 2 plugins. I’m not an expert, but this seems to do the job! And it’s all automatic

• exec-PHP, feedsnap & wp-sticky, with google reader and disqus: that was a good trick I used on my former blog to share my thoughts on daily news. I didn’t want to have to create a new post each time I had something to say about a piece of news, so I figured out this pretty cool automatic system I installed the disqus plugin on firefox. It works with google reader, and allows you to save comments regarding articles directly from google reader. Disqus has a RSS feed, and so I used feedsnap to render it on my blog – within a post that I featured at the top of my blog using wp-sticky. feedsnap works with PHP, so I needed exec-PHP for it to work. Tada!

• flickrRSS: using a cool little CSS trick, I could render a nice feed of my Flickr pics on my blog using flickrRSS. The point was that I could send daily pictures to my Flickr account using my iPhone,¬† tagging them with a keyword and then display them on my blog in real time. A cool little “real time” flavor for the blog!

• get recent comments & yet another related posts: 2 very nice plugins related to make your blog a little more lively and get people to interact more. The first one simply shows the most recent comments in the sidebar. The second adds a small “Related posts” section to all of your posts. Pretty useful to get your readers to spend more time on your blog, and re-discover past posts.

• Google Analytics, wp-postviews and wp-stats: all 3 great plugins to keep an eye on your stats and share them with your readers. I specially like the wp-postviews that displays how many people have seen/read any of your post.

• sociable: a nice little plugin similar to share-this, but that offers more customization possibilities. I have modified it slightly to fit my template using its CSS file. Really cool.

• wordpress database backup & wp-cache: both are must-have for obvious reasons. One might save your blog from a server crash. I personnaly use the daily email option. The other one will make your blog a little faster to load.

• wp2tumblr, twitter tools & Fruits: just to give my blog a little more exposure, I post all of my new posts to a tumblr account, and then on Facebook. Twitter tools allows you to also post to your Twitter account automatically. Finally, I also use Fruits site to automatically post all of my posts to a wordpress.com account. Once again to get more exposure.

I’m sure I’ll be doing more in the coming weeks, but those are really the basics that I am happy with and have been using for a few years now. What about you?