New Media discussion group for the community

February 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We have recently set up a discussion group focused on New Media for those in the community (business persons, journalists, students, community leaders) wishing to get their hands on blogging, Facebook, Twitter and other SNS or to simply exchange notes.

The New Media group will meet at 6.30pm onwards every last Monday of the month starting February 28 at the Blacktown Workers Club, Campbell Street, Blacktown City.

The discussion group is a joint project with the Filipino Press Group of Sydney.

For more information, please leave us a message or call 1300 631 663.

Filed Under: Blogs, Mobile Blog Tagged With: , , ,

Tutorials for self-hosted WP blogs

September 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

For those who have been following our posts at Working and WordPress-ing, thanks very much for your regular visits. We also sincerely appreciate your kind words and compliments.

You may be pleased to know we have recently started a series of basic lessons for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The new series will be focused mainly on self-hosted WordPress blogs.

For details, please visit our new site at http://101plus.techbusiness.com.au

Filed Under: News, Web Management Tagged With: ,

4 reasons why I prefer a self-hosted WordPress blog

January 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

By way of background, below entry was meant to be posted at my WordPress.com blogsite to conclude my seven weeks of blogging there. Instead, I decided to post it to this site. Hopefully, this will explain why most of my posts and articles in this site refer to WordPress.com.

I am using the same title I have at WordPress.com for this blog, Working and WordPress-ing. In my seven weeks of blogging at WordPress.com, I have posted more than 20 entries mainly dealing with “how-to’s” which made available in this site.

***

On day 1 when I started this blog, I mentioned that I am here at WordPress.com to gain insight into how it is to blog at WordPress.com.

Now running into my seventh week into this WP blogging journey and after 24 posts, I think I can say that I have achieved my objective. I’ve learned a lot, and I thought I was able to return the favour by sharing with you what I learned plus my experience as a self-hosted blogger.

We have covered various topics by way of posts and comments including the following :

  • A PollDaddy poll outside your WP blog
  • A simple solution to tweet and retweet your WP posts
  • How to embed a Vimeo video
  • How to embed a video in your WordPress.com-hosted blog
  • How to blog spam-free at WordPress.com
  • The role of internet service providers in curbing spams
  • Displaying photos in a gallery as an instructional aid
  • If you want to customize your tweets from your WP posts, do not ignore the developer’s Support page
  • Revisiting PicApp images and embed codes
  • Experimenting with PollDaddy in my blog
  • How to encourage audience response
  • Experimenting with PicApp images in my blog
  • How to customize your blog with widgets
  • How to post by email (an experiment)
  • How reliable is Alexa in measuring your site’s traffic rank?
  • How to upgrade your WordPress theme
  • How to start a blog at WordPress.com (A quick digression)
  • How to XHTML validate a WordPress theme
    • How to select a WordPress theme
  • How to blog at WordPress.com

The above articles are available on this site as well as in my WordPress.com blog.

Now that we have covered most of the basics in WP blogging, it’s time to move on. ( Note: I exported my WP posts to this site today.)

I will still be writing articles on WordPress-related topics, but these will be posted in my self-hosted blog and if allowed, distributed here.

What makes a self-hosted WordPress blog attractive to me? Conversely, what makes a WordPress-hosted blog unattractive to me?

Here are four reasons:

Themes. I like to experiment with themes, their layout, their architecture, their CSS, etc. This, I can not do here at WordPress.com unless I upgrade my account. Currently, WordPress.com has 77 themes. They are good themes, I admit, but most of them do not meet my requirements. (Like this theme I am using right now is not among the 77 themes.)

Plugins. I am restricted from installing plugins or scripts.

Inbound Traffic. Whilst a WP-hosted blog can leverage on the traffic coming from the traffic of other WP blogs flowing from “Possibly related-posts” linked at the bottom of every post, the traffic that I generate for my blog is “credited” to WordPress.com. Should I decide later to blog in a self-hosted blog (like this one), the traffic ranking I generated for my WP-hosted blog remain with WordPress.com. It is not portable.

Revenue. On paper, there are restrictions from running third-party ads in a WP blog. This is covered by point #5 / Item 2 of WP’s Terms of Service (see part of the provision which I styled in bold, below):

the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

Setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog is not that difficult. If you need help, please do not hesitate to contact me. Our group offers web hosting which includes WordPress and other blogging platforms.

Filed Under: Blogs Tagged With: ,

How to make WordPress a content management system

December 24, 2008 By 1 Comment

There are a number of excellent tutorials on how to change WordPress into a Content Management System. One of them is WordPress itself with very good documentation on the subject.

For those not familiar with computing, a content management system (CMS) is a document focused application for managing an organisation’s business documents including articles, pages and databases. A CMS is often web-based and often it is used as a method of managing web sites and web content.

No longer is WordPress the monopoly for blogging. In fact, a number of companies and businesses have implemented WordPress in their intranets and websites because of its versatility.

Making WordPress into a CMS simply involves customizing the theme and the Administration panels through the use of codes and plugins.

You don’t have to be an expert in XHTML, CSS, or PHP to change a WordPress blog to a CMS, but a knowledge of these languages helps. But you don’t have to build your CMS from ground up.

These days there are a number of WordPress developers and designers who can help. Some offer their CMS-like themes for free. Even a premium WordPress theme does not cost a lot these days. For $75, you can have basic shell of a WordPress CMS which you can customise to suit your preferences. The premium themes already have built in plugins to run the theme features.

You can try the iThemes and Revolution2 people for premium CMS themes. They have very functional and nicely designed themes.

*** Romeo Cayabyab is director of Compucentric consulting and lead researcher and writer of techbusiness.com.au

Filed Under: Web Management Tagged With: , ,