Alan Gutierrez

I am developing WordPress+FeedBlitz as a publishing platform for community organization. I’m in the process of building out a WordPress blog from zero, so I thought I’d record the procedure, for my future refrence. My non-technical readers can safely ignore this post.

Also, note that I’m editing this post as I run through my day.

Choose A Domain

First off, go to godaddy.com and choose a domain name. Gaudy web site and the godaddy girl aside, this is a good registrar. The free DNS is well worth the noise at purchase. If a domain has already been chosen and registered for the blog, have it transferred to godaddy.com.

Take advantage of the full service DNS to point the domain at whatever blogometer.com resolves to, which is currently 207.210.80.115. Point the MX at the e-mail server at ljubljana.blogometer.com. Take advantage of domain forwarding to forward aliased domains to the new domain.

While you’re thinking of it, update the postfix mail server configuration to accept the new domain.

Futz around and wait a bit for the DNS records to propagate.

Unzip WordPress

Unzip WordPress and update the Apache configuration. Set redirection so that www.domain.com redirects to domain.com . Update wp-config.php. Run the set up. Log in. Change the admin password. Create a user named alan. Make him an adminstrator. Log out and log in. Delete all the links that are included by default in the blogroll. Bump up the number of articles displayed in the feed and in the index to 16 or so.

If you have a template in mind, start using the template now. You’ll be able to make sure it works correctly with all the plugins.
Enable the Akismet plugin with your WordPress key from blogometer.wordpress.com.

Install the following necessary plugins.

• Recent posts.
• Recent comments.

Recent posts and recent comments will require you to add some text to your template, you can read about that in the read me file for Recent Posts and Recent Comments.

Enable URL rewriting by creating an .htaccess file that is owned by the user apache and the group apache.

Update the permalink structure so that permalinks look like so.

http://blogometer.com/2006/04/03/blog-unrolling/

Update the permalink structure so that categories look likes so.

http://blogometer.com/category/new-orleans/

Make sure to change the subtitle of the blog from “Just another WordPress weblog” to something meaningful.

Ensure that the template has a search box and that the box has a button that says OK. This will be consistant with the FeedBlitz subscription described below.

Ensure that the template has a meta section with login, valid XHTML, RSS links, and so on.

Ensure that the template will display a next posts and previous post when the display is a single article.

Add Statcounter

Currently I’m mucking about with Performancing and Sitemeter at The Blogometer. I’m using Statcounter as the default statistics suite for all blogs, until something convinces me otherwise, perhaps an invitation to Google Analytics.

Until then, create a new Statcounter project. Always choose to add the Statcounter code invisibly. Click on the lock to make the statistics public and to get the URL to view the statisitcs.

Add the URL under the Meta heading in the sidebar with the link text “Statistics”.

Add FeedBurner

Enable the FeedBurner WordPress plugin. Follow the instructions. Go to the FeedBurner tab. Grab the placeholder URL for the feed. Create a new feed at your FeedBurner account. After you choose your FeedBurner URL, update the FeedBurner WordPress plugin.

Continung with FeedBurner, activate SmartFeed. Active FeedFlare with Email This, Email the Author, Technorati Cosmos Links, Add to del.icio.us, and Comments Count. Run and fetch the Reddit Flare.

Geotag the feed if applicable.

Check the feed and flare in NetNewsWire or Feed Demon.

Remove all other alternate links so that only the feed with the path /feed/. Feedburner purports to translate that RSS 2.0 feed to Atom or RSS 0.9 for you.

Add a FeedBurner chicklet.

Add FeedBlitz

Create a new FeedBlitz feed. Cut and paste the subscribe form. Translate to XHTMl and replace the breaks with divs. Size up the box to be the same size as the search box. Create an OK button.

Subscribe an e-mail account the feed.

Send a test of the feed to the account.

Grab the FeedBlitz chicklet while you are at it.

Install Ultimate Tag Warrior

Install and enable the Ultimate Tag Warrior. Set URL rewriting on so that the tag collections have the following format.

http://blogometer.com/tag/new-orleans/

Alas, it does’t quite work so apply the changes to the .htaccess file outline in A temporary .htaccess rewrite fix for Ultimate Tag Warrior and Wordpress 2.0. Unfortunately, installing the FeedBurner plugin overwrites the changes, so I’ve moved the FeedBurner step before this one.

Hmm… The problem is that the tag listings are not found. It seems that if I go and resubmit the permalink structure for archives, this problem is fixed.

Opt to insert the tags into the syndicated feed.

Opt to include a list of existing tags in the editor.

Hack ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php so that the size of the tags edit box is 60 characters, and the style attribute sets the width at 98%. This keeps the edit box from overlapping the controls in the sidebar on the edit page.

Update the template to place a tag cloud at the end of the article and also to display the current tag set for the tag display.

I’ve played with related posts in this blog, and I’m curious to see if they are more effective than explicitly chosing related posts.

Guide The Robots

Create a robots.txt that reads as follows.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/

Check your robots.txt in a robots.txt validator.

This will hopefully keep the search engines from forever pointing at the tag pages. Not sure if this is a good idea, though.

Upload

Create a directory in wp-content named uploads. Change the ownership to user apache and group apache. Upload something to be sure it works.

Technorati Registration

If it is one of your own personal blogs, simply claim the new blog using your WordPress user anme and login.

If it is not one of your own personal blogs, create a Technorati account for the blog owner, if one does not already exist. When you create the account, you can use the real email address of the lblog owner, since there will not be an email validation prior to claiming the blog.

Once you’ve created the Technorati account, you are logged in, and you can claim the blog.

ClustrMaps

A pretty addition that everyone loves.

Go to ClustrMaps. Register using your email address. You will have to validate your email to obtain the HTML necessary for the map. When you get the email validation message, change the password to something you can remember, immediately.

You will not be able to change your email after registration, but that shouldn’t matter. There is nothing to configure.

Add the map above the clicklet list, create a new unordered list with a class name of icons.

Template Checklist

Ensure that the template has the following styling elements.

• Asides.
• Previous and forward links on the single blog entry view.
• Search box.
• Subscribe to email box.
• Archives.
• Date headings in the archive view.
• A tag list at the base of the article.
• The post author at the base of the article.
• A header that displays the tags for a tag listing.
• A 404 not found message.
• A definition of leftalign and rightalign classes for photographs.
• A title in the tag listing page that inclues the tag name.
• Make sure that the title for a single blog entry does not include the words “Blog Archive”.