Creating a ‘killer’ blog is not that hard to understand … but it is hard to do.

As the title of this post suggest, there are three things you need if you want to create a ‘killer’ blog:

1. Start with a great blog software.
2. Get a great design.
3. Produce great content.

The list above is in order of doing, but not the order of importance: content is still king and so you must be able to produce quality content on a regular basis for your blog, otherwise it won’t work.

Let’s look at some details …

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I just wanted to announce that my video tutorials on installing and using Wordpress are being featured in the latest edition of Web Designer Magazine.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

What is a gravatar?

Let’s take it from the source:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

From a community members point of view, what’s cool about gravatars is that you don’t have to upload your avatar image on every blog, forum or community that you are a member of. And from the community owner’s point of view, you can now add a little pizazz to your blog or forum with your members gravatars.

You can read more about gravatars in the magazine.

What is the difference between a CMS (content management system) and a Wiki?

In a nutshell:

Both are web based applications/software designed to allow many people to contribute content (typically articles … but podcast and videos are becoming more common) to a website.

I would say the basic difference is that a CMS (Ex: Drupal) is a closed system where only certain people can add or edit content to the website/cms.

On the other hand, a wiki is an open system where anyone can edit and add content. The idea behind a wiki is that the masses will eventually correct any false information – with the help of editors.

My thoughts:

I’m no wiki expert, but I see wiki’s being more suitable to general encyclopedic information. If you need a tighter structure and control over what is being posted on your site, I would be leaning towards a CMS rather than a WIKI.

That said, I am sure that the differences between the two types of software has room for a lot of gray area – I’m sure some CMS software have WIKI like functionality and vice versa.

How about blogs?

Blogs are kinda like a CMS for one person. One other distinction would be that the blog traditionally is date driven – where newer articles are posted to the front page of the blog. As with the WIKI/CMS blurring of the lines, you see the same with blogs and CMS software.

For example: Wordpress (a popular blog program) has CMS like features:

• Multiple users can post articles.
• You can have static non date affected pages. Wordpress call these ‘pages’.

Beyond the CMS-like features built into the core Wordpress package, Wordpress has a huge number of plug-ins out there that extend it’s capability considerably … bringing it even closer inline with a true CMS.

A few links:

Wordpress home page: www.wordpress.org
Drupal home page: http://drupal.org
Another popular CMS – Joomla: joomla.org
Wiki software: Media Wiki

Ciao,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

This first article is meant to give you a global picture about creating Wordpress themes. Let’s start by answering a few common questions.

Do you need to know PHP to create or edit Wordpress themes?

The short answer is no. It would help to know some PHP but many theme designers don’t, and they do just fine.

Do you need to understand MySQL to create or edit Wordpress themes?

Again, no. Mysql is the database that drives Wordpress and is a key component … nonetheless, it has no impact on creating themes. So don’t worry about it.

What do you need to know in order to be able to edit or create a Wordpress theme?

I would say that you need to know three basic things:

1. HTML/XHTML
2. CSS
3. The Wordpress page hierarchy and behavior.

I think the first two are obvious, but the last needs some more explaining.

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