A day at the Social Media Exchange – 3

I’m at the third masterclass of the day and it’s not even lunchtime!

Dave Briggs is running this session on “WordPress for good”

WordPress is an open source blogging platform -

• open source means that it’s “free as in beer and free as in speech”
• it produces rss feeds as a standard – helps people to keep in touch with what you are saying
• WordPress has in built commenting facility and loads of other cool tools

Before setting up your WordPress account, you need to decide if you want it to be .com or .org? – .com is a bit limited in what it can do and how it can be personalised

Some examples of typically bloggy type blogs

• http://wp4g.wordpress.com
• http://davepress.net
• http://blogs.dfid.gov.uk – Department for International Development, blogging about their experiences
• http://matthewtaylorsblog.com

And some not quite bloggy blogs

• http://socialmediaexchange.org.uk
• http://lowcarboncommunities.net
• www.walesoffice.gov.uk
• www.number10.gov.uk

What else can you do with WordPress?

• You can categorise your posts as “news” or by project to make it more like a regular website.
• Plug ins add cool stuff to WordPress blogs.
• WordPress can be easily themed around corporate colours, type faces etc.

http://www.wordpressforgood.com has some useful resources for setting up your WordPress blog.

… so, lunch! …

I’ve arrived

I can’t believe this is finally up and running …

I wanted to start writing a blog to tie in with the conferences I am going to be planning and running for the ICT Hub in 2007/08.  The plan is to blog before, during and after the conferences, let’s see how it goes!

I’m pretty new to this blogging game, so I chose to use the free wordpress.com service, which I know has been used by many of the other ICT bloggers out there.  It’s not an easy thing to get going and you need to be a confident computer user to make the most of it, there may be other blogging sites out there which are easier to set up, such as Blogger or MyBlogSite (although I haven’t tested either of these – any comments on how easy they are to use?).

That said, now that I have set up the blog it’s really easy to use, hey, I’ve almost finished my first post!

I’ve already had fun today with widgets, no not the things that make your beer go frothy, the little bits of code that you can copy and paste into the blog to make it do things, I used it to insert the ICT Hub logo.  I might try and be adventurous soon and insert some Flickr photos or other such wizardry.  Keep a look out.