All About Leatherman Tools

I don’t know how important tagging is, both in terms of search engine optimization as well as in terms of site usability. All I know is that tagging is another way to provide users with access to information in a classified manner. When writing an article for a blog we have the option of “tagging” the article. The problem is that unlike categories where WordPress gives you a list of categories to choose from, tagging is more of a free style process that gives you granular control of how an article is found on your blog.

This is great and simple enough to use, but if you write a lot of articles on the same topic, then tagging can be a chore. Luckily there’s a great plugin for WordPress that makes tagging less of a chore. You can find it here: Simple Tags. The developer’s website is here: Simple Tags Developer.

Simple Tags offers many options that add value to your articles, in particular, the following are worth mentioning:

1. You can select tags from previously written articles.  This creates a consistent tagging experience for both the writer and the reader.
2. Simple Tags will also suggest tags from Yahoo and the Internet, this is really cool.
3. Simple Tags integrates with the All in One SEO plugin in that certain features are disabled if the All in One SEO plugin is installed.
4. Embedded tagging allows you to write articles and embed tags in the articles, by using the “tagging” element identifiers which are customizable.  This is particularly useful if you’re submitting articles to your blog via e-mail.

There are many more features that we’ll discuss as we develop this blog.

So you’ve decided to read a bit more… great.

Your second decision in setting up an independent wordpress blog is to purchase a domain and find a hosting company that will allow you to run the wordpress application.  I’ll make it easy on you :-).  This domain is registered at godaddy.com and this website is hosted at hostgator.com.  The links below will take you to both sites, and yes, if you decide to purchase a domain or hosting, I make some money from it.  This is called affiliate marketing.  Are these the best? I don’t know, they work for me.

Domain Hosting - www.GoDaddy.com
Website Hosting - www.hostgator.com

There’s a lot of information out there about  picking the right domain name and it all depends on what you’re blogging about.  At the end of the day… pick one that works for you.  Ideally the domain name should be directly related to the content of the site. 

Considering I have tried to set up several blogs before but with limited success, I figured I would document the process of setting this blog up both as a diary of the process as well as to share what I’ve learned with others.

So the first thing you need to know is that there’s a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.  wordpress.com provides the WordPress blogging platform in a shared environment, that is you can set up a free blog through the wordpress.com platform, but the software is controlled and managed by wordpress.com.  wordpress.org provides you with a free copy of the platform which means you can customize it to you hearts content but you will need to host it.  This page gives an excellent comparison of the two platforms:

http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/07/wordpresscom-vs-wordpressorg/

So take a look at the page above and decide which platform suits your needs.  This blog is self hosted via the software and plugins found at wordpress.org.  The rest of the information provided in the articles on this site as far as blogging is concerned will be based on this methodology.

Good luck and happy blogging.  Register with us and post any comments or questions.

How to set up a WordPress blog - your second decision