Blogging mechanics with WordPress

Now that I’ve been blog­ging for awhile, I thought I’d post a bit about the process. I under­stand that many peo­ple come here with­out any inter­est in the mechan­ics of blog­ging. If so, then just skip this post. Oth­ers will be famil­iar enough with tech­ni­cal issues that all this will seem way too sim­ple. Again, just skip the post. If I make any mis­takes in attempt­ing to explain this, how­ever, I’m hope some­one with more tech­ni­cal knowl­edge than I have will let me know.

I started out, lo these cou­ple of years ago, using the free and easy Blog­ger ser­vice pro­vided by Google. The old ver­sion of this blog is still there; I’ll prob­a­bly get around to delet­ing it at some point. After a cou­ple of months I got tired of the lim­i­ta­tions imposed by blogspot. I had my own domain and host; after a lit­tle dig­ging I dis­cov­ered that my host would install Word­Press with just a but­ton press. Word­Press imports posts from Blog­ger, so I installed it and had it do that. I then had to man­u­ally import all of my images. That was kind of a pain, but not hard to fig­ure out.

There are a num­ber of free blog­ging plat­forms out there; Word­Press is one of the most pop­u­lar. It has its irri­ta­tions, but it is quite func­tional and has been extended in var­i­ous ways by a com­mu­nity of pro­gramers who mostly work for free (or for donations).

PHP, SQL, etc.

Word­Press works on top of two pieces of soft­ware. The first is a data­base sys­tem called MySQL (SQL stand for “struc­tured query lan­guage”). The data­base holds all of text of each post and other infor­ma­tion such as the name of the blog, the date and time of each post, etc. Word­Press itself is writ­ten in a pro­gram­ming lan­guage called PHP (which, so far as I can tell, orig­i­nally stood for “per­sonal home page” and now doesn’t really stand for any­thing). PHP is used to get infor­ma­tion from the data­base and trans­late it into infor­ma­tion that your web browser can under­stand. Every time you call up the front page of ATSH, the PHP pro­gram gath­ers infor­ma­tion from the data­base and gives it to your browser. The pro­gram knows how many of the most recent posts go on the front page, so it fig­ures out which to use based on their post­ing date. When you click on, say, a tag such as “egg tem­pera paint­ing” it pulls every post with that tag from the data­base and con­structs a page with those posts pre­sented in chrono­log­i­cal order. And so on.

Themes

Word­Press comes with a cou­ple of basic themes, but there are many oth­ers avail­able for down­load. A theme is what con­trols the look and feel of the blog; the col­ors, the head­ing, the num­ber of columns, the inter­face for mov­ing from one page to another, and so on. Lots of peo­ple write Word­Press themes and make them avail­able for free. There are oth­ers (usu­ally with more exten­sive or spe­cial­ized fea­tures) that you can buy. I use a free and excel­lent theme called Tarski.

Plu­g­ins

Other peo­ple write plu­g­ins for Word­Press. Like themes, there are many plu­g­ins avail­able for free. Plu­g­ins extend the basic func­tion­al­ity of Word­Press. Like Word­Press itself, plu­g­ins are pieces of soft­ware writ­ten in PHP. With most plu­g­ins, you install them, turn them on, adjust a cou­ple of set­tings, and they just work. I have plu­g­ins that block spam­mers from leav­ing com­ment spam, for exam­ple. Another plu­gin lets com­menters track replies to posts they’ve com­mented on. Yet another cal­cu­lates which posts are most “pop­u­lar” and lets me put a list of pop­u­lar posts in the side­bar on the left side of the page.

Mess­ing around with plugins

I like fid­dling with com­puter stuff, so I’ve spent some time mak­ing the blog look the way I want. With some plu­g­ins, that involves get­ting more technical.

For exam­ple, you’ll notice that there is a randomly-selected image in the top cor­ner of the side­bar. I use two plu­g­ins to make that hap­pen. One, called Ran­dom Image, selects an image at ran­dom from posts in what­ever cat­e­gory or cat­e­gories you wish. You can then place this bit of code somewhere:

<?php randomimage(); ?>

That that strange-looking string of words and sym­bols tells Ran­dom Image to query the data­base for a lists of posts in the selected cat­e­gories I’ve selected and fig­ures out which of those posts are asso­ci­ated with a pic­ture file. It then sticks one of those pic­tures in the place where I put the PHP code.

The other plu­gin I need to make this work is called “Exe­cutable PHP Wid­get.” A wid­get is an item in the side­bar on the left side of the page. Word­Press comes with wid­gets that allow you to type some text to be dis­played in the side­bar. Those stan­dard wid­gets don’t do any­thing with PHP code—they don’t treat it as pro­gram­ming code to be exe­cuted. The Exe­cutable PHP wid­get acts just like a Word­Press text wid­get, except that any PHP code in that kind of wid­get gets treated as code and exe­cuted. I pasted the above Ran­dom Image code into the wid­get, so that the code is exe­cuted and I get a ran­dom image in the sidebar.

I have no idea how to pro­gram with PHP. I didn’t need to in order to get these bits of soft­ware to work. That’s one of the great things about soft­ware such as Word­Press. On the other hand, if you are more scared of code than I am, you can use Word­Press with­out using a plu­gin such as Ran­dom Image. I do think it’s a nice fea­ture for an art blog.

Those are just a few of the details. Let me know if you want to hear more about how this all works, or if this is a waste of time.