Today marks the end of our first month blogging! I have been so busy with work lately, including putting together 2 new corporate blogs for other clients, that I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like, but it’s been a very interesting month of intense learning. During this month, I have installed 5 blogs from scratch, moved a blog 3 times to a different host, upgraded the blogs to the latest Wordpress 2.6, downloaded and experimented with dozens of themes, read thousands of articles and tips on blogging, and learned to customize themes by editing PHP. I’ve discovered the hard way that installing Wordpress on the root directory of your site breaks access to your WebDAV folders, required for comment-sharing on Acrobat. (Sorry, Music in Motion’s catalog department!) I have figured out where all the various components reside on Wordpress and how the structure works so it’s not quite as mysterious. Here are just some of the things I’ve learned about blogging and Wordpress so far:

Read blogs about blogging to get good tips.

It can sometimes feel like looking into a room of never-ending mirrors, but reading blogs about blogging is a very good way to learn this stuff fast. There are technical articles on how to do stuff in Wordpress, there are posts about search engine optimization tricks, and tips on how to write good posts that will insipre people to subscribe to your site and participate in your blog. Here’s a list of the ones I’ve found the most useful. I have subscribed to them in Google Reader and have been skimming the articles every morning.

• Lorelle on Wordpress
• Daily Blog Tips
• Pearsonified
• Copyblogger
• Problogger
• Epiblogger

Start off with a well-coded theme which is easy to customize.

There are zillions of free and paid themes for Wordpress out there– some are great and some are terrible. Some are regular blog style, some are grid-based, some are intended for art or photo portfolios, and some are new or magazine-style. Every time I find a good one, I download it and put it in a "themes" directory on my computer, just in case. I have narrowed down my current favorites list to these:

Free themes:

• Statement by Blog Oh! Blog
• Whitespace and Blue Zinfandel by Brian Gardner
• Silhouette by Brian Gardner
• WP-Andreas 01 by Andreas Viklund
• Copyblogger by Chris Pearson
• Massive News by WP Elements

Premium paid themes:

• Revolution Pro Business by Brian Gardner. Excellently coded and flexible. I bought the developer’s license and am designing one client’s main website with this, and planning on redoing our own Stewart Design website (some day!) with this as well.
• Fresh News by Woo themes
• Thesis Theme by Chris Pearson. Very accessible, extremely well documented, with excellent attention to typography, and rotating images. I plan to buy the developer license for this one as well, as soon as the next project comes around where I can use it.

Other people’s reviews of their favorite themes

I like to look at collections of what people consider the best themes– there’s a lot of good info there, and you benefit from other people’s research:

• Best Premium Wordpress Themes on Premium WP
• Best Wordpress Template Designs on Problogger. Read the comments from readers
• Best Wordpress Themes on Squidoo
• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes on Smashing Magazine
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (probably) Haven’t Seen on Smashing Magazine

Try not to move your blog.

I have moved 3 blogs in the past month, and it wasn’t particularly easy. Installing Wordpress on a new location is pretty painless, but moving the database is another story altogether. You have to use an online tool like phpmyadmin (often installed by default on your web host) to export the database to a text file, then you have to do a bunch of search-and-replaces to update all the links to the new URL. Then you have to use phpmyadmin to re-import the new database. And still, sometimes the images and links still don’t come across. And I noticed that Wordpress strips out hyperlinks inside of your posts sometimes. Grr! Easiest thing by far is to spend a few minutes before you start your blog deciding exactly where you want it to be, and don’t move it.

On top of the technical hassle of moving your blog, you lose any SEO credits you may have built up.

Make backups.

While you’re developing your blog, you might end up screwing something up beyond repair. Before I edit any themes or mess with PHP, I create a folder called "backup" and copy the original files there. If you break something, just copy the original file back in its place.

I use the free FTP tool Filezilla to download backups of everything in my Wordpress directory. You also should periodically back up your database, which is where all the actual post and page text content is stored. To back up your Wordpress database, you need to use a database management tool like phpmyadmin, which is usually accessed through the control panel of your web host. There, you will be able to export a .sql file (which is just a little text file) and keep it as a backup on your computer. Should something blow up, you can use phpmyadmin to re-import the database, and it’s at least better than starting from scratch.

That’s it for now. time to get back to blogging!