A lot of blogging software is specifically designed to be simple to use, but even the least intimidating blogging program can feel very overwhelming to somebody who has not spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of different kinds of software. Particularly for newer bloggers, learning how to use the interface of blogging software is the most difficult part of blogging. If you are somebody who feels comfortable expressing themselves in another medium, it may prove to be well worth your time and effort to learn blogging software, but that doesn’t mean that the task will be easy.

The main thing that will help you find success as you learn how to use a new kind of blogging software is to try and take things slowly. Many people get so excited about learning to blog that they try to rush into the thick of it and start exploring the most complicated features of a program right away. This can lead to getting confused and feeling frustrated, and all too many potential bloggers burn out during this stage of the process. If you take your time learning the basics of your blog software program before you move on to more advanced techniques, you will be more likely to retain what you have learned, and to keep feeling positive about your ability to understand the world of blogging.

Tags: creation, designer, webmaster, web development, website, design

Blogging, Essentials, WordPress

1. Akismet - comment anti-spam (from Matt Mullenweg available at Akismet)
2. Do Follow - disables the “nofollow” tagging in comments (by Kimmo Suominen available at his website)
3. Meta-Tags - meta tag management for your blog (by Can Erten available here)
4. Optimal Title - puts the title of articles first on the title of the page (by Aaron Schaefer available on his ElasticDog blog)
5. Recent Comments - shows recent comments with link back to commenter’s site and link to comment (by Liew Cheon Fong and available on his blog)
6. Related Posts - creates a list of posts that are related to the one above (by Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne and available here [Editor’s note: the wasabi website seems to be down and has been for several days]
7. PHP Contact Form - adds a form based contact page that is spam proof (by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley available here)
8. Subscribe to Comments - notifies commenter’s via email when someone else makes a comment on the thread (by Mark Jaquith and available here)
9. WordPress Database Backup - on-demand and scheduled backup of your blog database (by Scott Merrill and Atin Matzko and available here)
10. WP-Cache - fast caching of your blog pages (by Ricardo Galli Granada and available here)

Tags: designer, web development, website, creation, design, webmaster

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