Showing all posts tagged: blogs

Blog publishing application WordPress has turned twenty

29 May 2023

When I re-launched disassociated as a blog in 2007, being one of many reboots this website has been subject to since 1997, I migrated to blog publishing application WordPress (WP). Prior to that, all pages here were laboriously hand coded. Hand coding was a hangover from my web design days, and my distaste for WYSIWYG website editors. My beef, at the time, with many of these webpage builders was the way they worked. Best practice, and standards, were an alien concept to them, to say nothing of the extraneous code they generated.

One, that shall remain nameless, created rollover code for text hyperlinks using JavaScript. JavaScript. This despite the web being well into the age of CSS generated rollover code by that stage. Come 2007 though, apps like WP were the way to go. Other bloggers I was speaking to then told me WP, or similar such CMSs, would save a bundle of time, and allow me to go about my disassociated way. I’m sure glad I listened to them. “WP is working for me, even while I sleep,” one counterpart said.

I was sold. By that stage WP had been around for about four years, but was still regarded as being relatively new. It was enough to make me feel as if I were some sort of (sort of) pioneer. But WP frustrated the hell out of some people. Many felt WP’s core capabilities were lacking, necessitating an over dependence on plugins — small apps that add, or extend to, WP’s functionality — to bring about the website, or blog, they desired. Ben Barden, a developer and blogger, once created his own CMS, back in the day, named Injader, for this reason.

But I’ve always strived to keep the backend as simple as the front. My use of plugins is as minimal as the interface design. All I want to do is write and post content. But here we are in 2023. disassociated, still styled (mostly) with a lowercase d, which first came into being in 1997 (not as a blog, the term was yet to be coined), is, despite stops and starts, still publishing. And this week WP is twenty years old. So, happy birthday WordPress, and thanks for being here. I’m looking forward to your thirtieth, which will really be something if disassociated is still doing its thing.

RELATED CONTENT

, , ,

Clive Thompson: how blogging changes the way you think

5 January 2023

American journalist, author, and blogger, Clive Thompson, writing about the benefits of blogging. The audience effect is one of the positives, and will go a long way to sharpening your writing:

But blogging has another benefit, which is that it triggers the “audience effect”. The audience effect is precisely what it sounds like: When we’re working on something that will soon go before an audience, we work far harder than if we’re doing work that’s for our eyes only. For decades, psychologists have documented the audience effect in studies: If you have experimental subjects write out an explanation for other people, for example, it’ll be far longer and clearer and more comprehensive than if you ask them to write it merely for themselves.

RELATED CONTENT

,

Monique Judge: bring back personal blogging in 2023

5 January 2023

Monique Judge, writing for The Verge:

Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.

I’m all for this, obviously. But as I wrote last month, social media apps have made it so easy to create a web presence (should I even use that term in 2023?), that buying a domain name, and installing a blogging application, seems like a lot of work.

Still to those willing to put in the hard yards, more power to you. And, for a more… succinct call to action, read Start a Fucking Blog, by Kev Quirk.

RELATED CONTENT

, ,

Presenting Injader: content management for everyone

29 September 2008

Sydney IT manager and software developer Ben Barden is the creator of Injader, an open source content management system (CMS) for websites and blogs, and an Australian made alternative for the likes of WordPress or Movable Type.

Update: Injader is no longer available.

Originally published Monday 29 September 2008.

RELATED CONTENT

, , ,