Choosing what blog to setup and setting up that blog can be difficult for those who haven’t done it before. If the blog you choose has plugins, then choosing what plugins to install is also a difficult decision for many bloggers.

Wordpress and Permalinking

Here is what we do everytime we need to setup a blog on one our sites. We have decided that wordpress suited our needs the best. After we download wordpress we try to find a theme that would be optimal for the site we are working on, then we customize the theme to look the way the site looks or if the blog is the site we make it look the way the designer has designed it. We usually set our site to use permalinking, which is a way to customize the way the URL (address bar) looks. So instead of seeing an address with symbols like question marks, you see an address that looks like directories. We usually set our permalink to /%category%/%postname%/ which means it will look just like that except the percent words are replaced with real data. The last settings to setup are all for the comment system, whether you want to approve all comments, just new comments or no comments.

All-in-One SEO Pack

After we setup the basic settings of wordpress to our preferred setup, we choose what plugins we need. There are multiple plugins for every category, we just found the plugins that suited our needs the best. Most of the time our blogs will be serving some kind of SEO purpose, so we download a plugin called All-In-One SEO Pack that takes care of telling the search engine bots what pages it should index and what pages to leave alone. So it doesn’t index duplicate content. Another plugin we use is yaCAPTCHA, it helps cut down on the comment spam by making a user read a random string from a picture and input it into a text field.

Please Link 2 Me and Feedburner

Please Link 2 Me is a plugin that allows the user to copy a snippet of html code that points to the current post. Then they can send it to a friend through email or they can put it on their website. In that same category we have a plugin that allows the user to use any of the popular social bookmarking to bookmark that post. Recently we started to use Feedburner with our blogs, so we got the feedburner plugin that basically redirects a user to your blogs feedburner page when a user clicks on a link that points to your blogs feed.

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On our sites we usually use javascript because with flash you have to buy the program and learn how to use it, and javascript you can usually download a script or two and set it up. Some advantages of using javascript over flash are the code used to include a flash piece isn’t completely valid html code and if it is valid it isn’t cross-browser compatible and javascript is completely valid and cross-browser compatible. Javascript needs no external programs in order to work, where with flash you need the Adobe Flash Player, flash has to be created from scratch where javascript, depending on the script, the script would just have to know what folder the images are in and it will do the rest. Finally when changing pictures, the flash piece needs to be opened, find the frames of the picture, change them to have the new picture while making sure to align the picture correctly. In javascript you just remove the old picture from the images folder and put the new one into the images folder. If you include an image preload script javascript can be just as fast as any flash file, and javascript can imitate almost any of the transitions you can do with flash.

The only time we can think of flash being a better choice is when a browser is so old that it doesn’t have javascript capibilities or the user has turned off javascript, but those cases are extremely rare. The web is evolving and those who don’t have or use javascript are only seeing part of the web.

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