Creating a blog Support
A “blog”, short for “web blog” is an online diary or journal, organised in date order. Blogs are popular as a personal site – a way to share places that you have visited online, your daily life or thoughts on a particular subject. There are personal blogs on almost every imaginable subject. More recently businesses have discovered that a blog is a powerful way to communicate in a more informal manner with customers, to keep them up to date with industry developments, or highlight interesting features of products. Macromedia are a good example of a company that is using blogs in this way, you can read blogs written by several of their employees, such as John Dowdells here: http://www.markme.com/jd/.
In this article we will explore how to create a blog using one of the popular, and free to download blog applications that are available - Wordpress. This is the first of two tutorials looking at Wordpress, this one is suitable for absolute beginners with this tool and will look at the basic install and some of the most important configuration options once it is installed. Next time we will create a completely customised template for your blog and look at how to select which features you want to use.
Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.
Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.
As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272
Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.
In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.