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CMS, computers, HTML-XML-CSS, eLearning, open sources

CMS, computers, HTML-XML-CSS, eLearning, open sources

Using Moodle (second edition)

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open source software for online learning courses

Two or three years ago, attempts to put educational courses on line were stuck with using programs such as Blackboard and WebCT, which were costly, cumbersome, and deeply unpopular with the teachers who were being urged to use them. Now these programs are being swept away by the arrival of Moodle, the open source Content Management System (CMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which has one killer feature: it’s free.

Using MoodleActually, it also has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that’s not the only reason it’s being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, this is a ‘constructivist’ program. That is, it allows people to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led, and it promotes learning through doing rather than just passive reception. This is the second edition of a basic introduction to Moodle’s features – and it’s a big improvement over the first edition.

Jason Cole and Helen Foster start off quite rightly by taking you on a tour of the user interface – what you see when you start using Moodle. That is – how to log in and edit your user profile; how to navigate through the sections of a course using the breadcrumb trail; and how to explore all the tools and support information buttons which surround the main working area on screen.

Moodle allows you to arrange your courses chronologically, conceptually by topics, or socially according to the people using it. For tutors there is an amazing degree of control over every aspect of a course – its start date, duration, enrolments, course materials, quizzes, email forums, activities, reports, and student grades.

The heart of Moodle is the huge variety of interactive engagements it will support. These range from chatrooms, forums, and discussion boards, to collective activities such as building glossaries, journals, surveys, and (perhaps most novel of all) an option for student peer assessment.

The book’s basic assumption is that you are using what’s called ‘blended learning’ – that is, a combination of face-to-face tuition such as lectures or seminars, plus online course materials and lecture notes, email support, instant messaging – and anything else that will empower the student and enhance the learning process. It is also assuming a fairly mature and serious attitude to eLearning from the student.

From my experience of online teaching, they seem a bit over-optimistic about participation rates in discussion forums, but Moodle certainly does have some sophisticated features to help promote debate. For instance, the latest version allows participants to rate each other’s contributions (though you might have doubts about that being a good thing).

There are many other features that teachers will welcome. Add a news item for your group, and every member of it will automatically be sent an email informing them of the update. There are also handy tips such as reducing file sizes and saving PowerPoint presentations as Rich Text File format to save space.

They confront head on the issue of possible cheating in online tests, and provides a number of strategies for counteracting twisters. The most advanced current feature of Moodle is workshops – which allow students to see good and bad examples of coursework, and to offer critiques of each other’s work prior to formal submission.

That comes with the additional feature of what’s called an exercise. This is a piece of work the student submits along with a self-assessed grade. Their final grade is a combination of the tutor’s score and how well the student’s assessment matches it. This is an example of what struck me as verging on Utopian.

The journals feature is a tool that encourages students to reflect on their own learning process. Glossaries offers a similar property in that they can be created collaboratively. Lessons is a system of developing multiple-choice enquiries. That is, if you answer a question correctly, you move on the next topic; if you do not, you move back to check you understand the course materials.

Moodle even has its own built-in Wiki, so tutor and students can assemble basic information about their subject. Various levels of permissions for editing and access are also available so that the results can be safeguarded.

This is an excellently clear user’s guide, and almost every topic is illustrated with a screenshot. Full technical software documentation is available at Moodle, but if you’re anything like me, you will feel far more secure with a book to hand.

In this second edition there’s far more detail on how Moodle tools and features can be used to meet teaching objectives as techniques for the equivalent of classroom activity. This is getting closer to the book on constructing online learning courses which still needs to be written.

There are descriptions of how various IT champions are using Moodle to develop new forms of collaborative, blended and social learning . Some of these will seem rather advanced to even to even the most ambitious elearning tutor. Peer assessment, messaging and chat facilities could easily be seen as distractions for younger learners, but could be more appropriate for adults.

There’s still room for improvement in future editions. I would like to see some examples of course design and structure for instance. But for now, this is still the best guide to Moodle available in book form.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Jason Cole & Helen Foster,Using Moodle, Sebastopo (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.266, ISBN: 059652918X

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We the Media

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open sources – writing and new web technology

O’Reilly publish computer books and software guidance manuals, but they also support the open source movement. This seeks to make the code of software available to be developed and used free of charge. This book is one of their contributions to the polemic. We the Media is a study of committed writing which argues the case for what author Dan Gillmor calls open source journalism. He takes the idea of sharing code into the realms of information exchange. To this is coupled his enthusiasm for blogging as the greatest form of New Journalism. He also discusses the other forms in which information can easily be transmitted – such as peer-to-peer file sharing, Wikis, the mobile connected camera, text messaging, and RSS feeds.

Open Source JournalismHis basic argument is that journalists, news broadcasters, public relations people, political activists, and anybody else who wants their message to be taken seriously should make full use of these latest communication tools. He gives plenty of examples of IT-activism – people mounting public information on web sites when the authorities removed it from public view; others raising political campaign funds from adverts on blogs.

He seems a little over-optimistic about their effectiveness for political activism, but on firmer ground when it comes to more neutral journalistic uses.

For anybody who is short of ideas, his chapters are packed with practical examples of successful enterprises which have been launched on the strength of a new blog. These range from one-person campaigns or news services, to blogs which generate income or sponsorship. One intrepid soul asked people for the money to send him to report the war in Iraq – and he got it.

Gillmor also gives a cautious glimpse into the future by looking at the latest trends in web technology. This includes news aggregators, RSS feeds, and Web Services. All of these enable information to be gathered automatically and customised by the user.

In the latter part of the book he looks at some of the legal implications of the latest technologies – cases where people have claimed to be libeled, copyright cases, cybersquatting, even cases where people have sought to prevent others deep-linking into their sites. He deals with all these issues in a way which supports freedom of speech, whilst recognising that it might sometimes be put to negative purposes.

Strangely enough, he does have some reservations about the current state of copyright, which he sees as increasingly restrictive to the point of abuse:

What were once 14-year terms have now been extended to the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years when a copyright is held by a corporation. By amazing coincidence, copyright terms seem to get extended every time Mickey Mouse comes close to entering the public domain

This is a committed and wide-ranging polemic which explores the very latest developments in online communications – both from a technological and a content point of view.

In keeping with the high standards he advocates throughout, he acknowledges and references all his sources, there is a huge webliography listing all the homepages, sites, and blogs mentioned; and the book has its own web site where you can follow up on his arguments, find software, and even download a copy of the book free of charge.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Dan Gillmor, We the Media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2006, pp.336, ISBN: 0596102275

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Weaving the Web

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the history of the Web – by the man who invented it

Everybody knows that Tim Berners-Lee is the man who invented the World Wide Web – and that he hasn’t become a millionaire. Weaving the Web explains the reasons why. It’s his own account of one of the most profound developments in twentieth century technology – almost as important as the invention of the Net itself. His story begins in one of the spiritual homes of computing – Manchester UK – where his both his parents worked on the first commercial mainframes made by Ferranti in the 1950s.

Weaving the WebHe wrote his first program to link information in 1980 with “no loftier reason than to help me remember the connections amongst the various people, computers and projects at the [CERN] lab”. He was concerned to share information amongst a community of scientists who were equipped with different languages, different computers, and different operating systems – and it’s interesting to note the persistence of this altruism as the development unfolds.

His narrative is the now-familiar one of noble intentions battling against indifference, resistance, and outright opposition. There is a wonderful sense of intellectual excitement in following the step-by-step struggle to convince people that information could be linked and shared. And all this is as recent as 1990.

There were also conceptual difficulties. Ten years ago, people on the Net were regularly ‘lost in Cyberspace’ – an expression you don’t see used much any more. How difficult it was for most of us to conceptualize all this back in the early 1990s. It was not an easily intuitive thing to take in that when you clicked on a link you were ‘going’ to a computer at the other side of the world. Worse still – when the connection dropped, you felt as though you had fallen out of an aeroplane in mid-Atlantic. We’ve learned since not to worry when something disappears off the screen.

He discusses the competing systems such as Gopher and WAIS [remember those] and the strategic advantage of making SGML the base for hypertext markup language [HTML], the lingua franca of the Web. He is also forthright enough to admit his own failings, and even describes a conference paper which was rejected, as well as a rather sadly uneventful meeting with Ted Nelson in 1992. There’s also an explanation of how the rather clumsy term URL came about, though he continues to use URI [Indicator] throughout the book.

Once the Web takes off in the early 1990s, people such as Jim Clark and Marc Andreesson start to come into the picture. But whilst they make their fortunes turning Mosaic into Netscape, Berners-Lee selflessly devotes his energies to keeping the Web universal, out of the control of individual interests.

It has to be said that the story begins to dip a little at this point, with important but less dramatic decisions to be taken about protocols and standards.

Click for details at AmazonBy 1996 we’re deep into the details of the Web Consortium [WC3] and its workings. The story picks up again as he covers the Netscape-Microsoft squabble and the move towards extensible markup language [XML]. He goes on to discuss the problems of encryption, privacy, censorship, domain name registration, and policies which should be in place to protect the individual. He also indulges in a little futurism, speculating about the consequences of permanent online connections [Yes please!] and the benefits of XML, which he strongly endorses. His account culminates with a prediction that the Web will evolve into what he calls the ‘Semantic Web’ – a system whereby information will be more intelligently and qualitatively structured.

It’s a relatively easy book to read. I had the impression that it’s a transcript of interviews. And he ends, rather surprisingly, by revealing his belief in parallels between the Web and a ‘non-religious’ faith he has taken up in the US. But one thing remains constant throughout – his passionate desire to keep the Web an open, international standard – and for that we can all be grateful.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, London: Orion Books, 1999, pp.244, ISBN 0752820907

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late

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computer and Internet pioneers – a historical account

Do you know who invented the Internet? No, it wasn’t Al Gore – even though he once foolishly claimed he did. And in fact, it wasn’t just one person. What this fascinating documentary study reveals is the teamwork, the complementary technologies, and even the engineering competition which led to its development. It also dispels the notion that the innovation was fuelled by cold war defence concerns about possible nuclear attack.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late The majority of early adopters were research scientists in particle physics who simply wanted access to each other’s work. At first it was just a few research departments of US universities which linked themselves. The computers were huge mainframe affairs, and the results at that time still came through on punched tape. There were no mice or monitors, no Windows, and even the tiny amounts of memory were laughably small by today’s standards.

It’s amazing to realise how recent all these developments have been. It also emphasises the fact that this major innovation was a result of simultaneous developments in a number of separate disciplines, and one which came out of the sort of team work and democratic ethos which have left their mark on the Net to this day.

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s account adopts a lively documentary approach to telling the story of how it all happened. The writing is much influenced by Tom Wolfe’s new journalism, with rapid character sketches, cliff-hanging chapter endings, use of dramatic understatement, on-the-spot point of view, and lots of well-researched technical detail. Having said that, it’s not always an easy read. The names of engineers and scientists come in thick and fast, and the chronology jumps around bewilderingly in the sixties and seventies – but what emerges is a fascinating picture of many technological developments eventually pulled together to deliver what was in fact the birth of the Internet.

There’s a wonderfully dramatic moment when all the strands are pulled together in a contract submission to run the network – the computers, the wired links, and what emerges as the heart of the Net – packet-switching technology. This was invented simultaneously by Donald Davies in the UK and Paul Baran in the US. It allows information to be broken up into small units, transmitted, then reassembled without loss at any other part of a distributed network.

Their timescale stops short in the 1970s – which means the story doesn’t include anything on the World Wide Web – and strangely enough there’s very little mention of people such as Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson. Their focus is all on the often wacky individuals and the college-boy teams who went on to become the Founding Fathers, though I was also glad to see that they give electrical engineers their due.

Other more well-orchestrated histories of this revolutionary development may be written in the future, but this one will be difficult to beat in the short term as an account of the skills, the drama, and the sheer inventiveness of these Net pioneers. There’s a full bibliography and a good index, so it’s no surprise that this title has been chosen as a set text on one of the Open University’s most popular ever courses – ‘You, your Computer, and the Internet’.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the origins of the Internet, New York: Free Press, new edition 2003, pp.304, ISBN 0743468376

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Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

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Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the world. It’s currently twenty-five times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica, and expanding with every day that passes. That’s because anybody can add entries, edit the content, correct mistakes, or contribute new materials. But if you go to Wikipedia and try to start adding your own entries, supplementing other people’s contributions, or correcting mistakes – it’s not quite as simple as it might seem.

Wikipedia: The Missing ManualThere’s online help, but it’s rather deeply buried. That’s why books such as this one from the ‘missing manuals’ series have come into being. They provide the user guides which nobody in open source projects has got round to writing yet. This one doesn’t just tell you about how to create new Wikipedia entries or edit ones that already exist, it explains what types of new material will be acceptable, and which will not.

For instance, I found an entry recently which gave information about the main road which runs through the suburb of south Manchester UK where I live. It listed public buildings, a little local history, and topographical details.

But if I had a dog called Bosun and keyed in an entry on his appearance and habits, that would be removed. The reason? It doesn’t pass the ‘notability’ test. In other words, who cares about your pet dog, or your lovely daughter, or your taste in wallpaper? Yet if you happened to have some botanical information about sycamore trees, or the statistics related to voting patterns, that might be welcomed as new material.

John Broughton covers all the essentials a beginner will need to know – how to add or edit entries; how to create hyperlinks and footnotes; and how to add graphics. So if you would like to join the tens of thousands of (unpaid) volunteers adding to the six million articles in 250 languages – this is a great place to learn the rules of engagement.

The whole of Wikipedia is supervised by volunteer editors; everything is checked; and a record is kept of any changes made, plus when they were made, and who made them. If you were to insert a paragraph saying that Elvis Presley had recently been seen in Tesco, it would immediately be deleted. And if you mischievously added links to your own web site hoping to drive up traffic, these pages would be ‘reverted’, which is Wikispeak to say that they would be wound back to what they were before.

These are some of the reasons why readers can trust Wikipedia more than is sometimes thought. It is a self-regulating mechanism, and vigorous systems exist to combat mistakes, vandalism, and spam. Even the editors have other editors, checking their work.

Even though anybody can add entries to Wikipedia, it’s quite interesting to note what is not allowed. The list includes the presentation of original ideas, routine news coverage, self-promotion, instruction manuals, plot summaries and song lyrics, announcements, sports, and gossip. That’s why my dog Bosun doesn’t get a mention.

John Broughton leaves the technicalities of how to create pages and arrange tables of contents until the end. These sections also include some interesting details on Wikipedia’s house style – no definite or indefinite articles in titles for instance, and bulleted lists are discouraged.

The latter part of the book deals with issues which will interest information architects – the classification of data, how articles are categorized, and how Wikipedia deals with ‘disambiguation’ – which occurs when a single term can have multiple meanings. For instance ‘mercury’ could be the liquid metal or the mythological messenger. Wikipedia deals with these cases using what’s called ‘the principle of least astonishment’ – in other words, what would a reader most likely expect to see listed first.

He ends with some interesting tips on editing and what are essentially collaborative writing skills, plus guidance on checking sources and links, and striving for accuracy in all things. This is rather like an excellent potted course on online journalism. So if you fancy making a contribution, just sign on and get started. Wikipedia even lists articles which are waiting to be written. And to complement its spirit of open sources, the whole book is also available at Wikipedia.org where you are invited to edit and enhance its value.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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John Broughton, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, O’Reilly, Sebastopol: CA, 2008, pp.477, ISBN: 0596515162

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Word Hacks

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Industrial-strength tricks for getting more out of Word

Microsoft Word is the world’s most popular word-processor – yet many people never use some of the powerful tools it has to offer. They might jiggle around with a few font choices and toolbar options, but there is a lot more under the bonnet which isn’t immediately apparent. Andrew Savikas’s new book Word Hacks offers tips and guidance for harnessing these hidden strengths. The tips are graded at beginner, moderate, and expert level – so you can work in a way which is comfortable for you. He starts off by telling you how to deal with all the menu options to make Word work as you want it to. Then it’s on to macros – a list of commands which you can store, to save you the problem of boringly repetitive keystrokes and menu choices. He also shows you how to hack your shortcut menus, and how to customise Word.

Word HacksThis ranges from trivial things such as changing the icons and buttons on your toolbars, to getting rid of the annoying and very unpopular Help assistant (Mr Paperclip). He then moves on to more useful tricks such as increasing the number of most recently used files (MRU) listed at the bottom of the File menu, and shows you how to mess with the number of font options available.

He shows you how to display samples of your fonts instead of just a list of their names; how to create bar graphs using tables; how to repeat a chapter heading across multiple pages; and how to increase the number of styles you can apply to footnotes ands captions.

Most of these tips only require you to type out a short macro (which he supplies) or to hack gently at the regular menu options. Any of the longer procedures are then saved as macros and assigned a keyboard shortcut of your choice.

You’ve probably noticed that Web addresses typed in Word turn automatically into hyperlinks – underlined and coloured blue. For those people (like me) who find this annoying, he shows you how to change the appearance and even get rid of them.

For serious and industrial strength writing he shows you how to do powerful search and replace edits, how to add custom (and temporary) dictionaries for special projects, how to take control of the way Word deals with bulleted lists, and how to make the most out of Word’s outlining feature.

There’s a whole chapter devoted to troubleshooting common Word problems – such as missing toolbars, repeated freezes and crashes, and the proliferation of unwanted temporary files. Then he finishes with some fairly advanced suggestions on forms and fields, plus how to get Word to perform calculations using tables, and using Word to work in XML and XSLT.

My guess is that this is one for people who like Word, who are committed to staying with it, and who want to get more from it in terms of power and productivity. It will also be useful to writers and editors working on book-length projects and reports. As usual with O’Reilly publications, the layout and presentation are impeccable.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Andrew Savikas, Word Hacks: Tips and Tools for Taming your Text, Sebastapol: CA, 2004, pp.372, ISBN: 0596004931

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WordPress 2.7 Complete

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Create your own web site from scratch with WordPress

WordPress 2.7 Complete. WordPress started out as blogging software, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it is open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra modules for the basic program. These are plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do.

WordPressBut like many other OSS programs WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from April Hodge Silver is welcome. She starts out by explaining some basic concepts and parts of WordPress as software. This might appear a little simplistic, but in my experience it’s quite important to grasp some of the fundamentals of a content management system. For instance it’s not immediately apparent that all the parts of what will eventually appear on screen as a unified page are kept separate. That is, the title, sub-title, text, pictures, captions, tags, and meta-data are all stored in different parts of the database – for good reasons. And of course the appearance of this information on screen is controlled separately too – from a style sheet.

She then describes how to make a WordPress installation of your own, and how to set up all the basic configuration of the system. You can get WordPress.com to do all of this for you, by hosting your installation. But they do not give you permission to install the extras with which you can customise your site (and make money from it).

Posting a blog entry is very, very easy, and WordPress also makes it as easy as possible to control and format what you write. But she explains all the options clearly, including the way in which you can add graphics to make your pages more visually interesting.

All of this means getting to know the control panel and its multiple menus, and her explanations are very helpful, because it isn’t always possible to tell what function some item performs simply from its title. What’s the difference between a page and a post for instance? The name alone tells you nothing.

One of the really good things about WordPress is that most of the content of any site is organised using what are called management tables. These are lists of all the basic information known about any item, and because the data is tabulated, it’s much easier to understand and control.

The next part of the book deals with two features which really bring WordPress to life – themes (which is WP jargon for templates) and widgets, which are ‘sidebar accessories’ that allow you to personalise what shows up your sidebars – without having to learn any PHP or HTML code.

In fact the urge to have an individualised site is so universal that she wisely includes instructions for designing your own theme. It’s at this point you’ll need HTML design skills and a knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS) – but she provides some basic coding to get you started.

And for those readers with a creative bent who have coding skills she also demonstrates how to create your own plugins and widgets. (A widget is just a plugin with extra functions.) But you’ll also have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dive into the database at this point.

There’s an interesting chapter on using WordPress as a content management system. This explains in some detail the difference between static pages and normal posts, and it presents a different type of theme which is geared to the construction of a commercial site with product pages. Although they are not covered here, there are now excellent plugins offering fully-featured eCommerce systems.

WordPress is now up to version 2.9 – but I checked all the basic concepts outlined in this book, and they still hold good. Even the copious screen shots illustrating the guidance show exactly what you’ll see when you start using the latest version. This is an excellent guidance manual which I could have done with a year ago when I first started learning how to use WordPress. It would have saved me lots of time and speeded up the process enormously.

© Roy Johnson 2010

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 2.7 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2009, pp.277, ISBN 184719656X

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WordPress 3.0 Complete

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a blog, web site, and content management system

WordPress 3.0 (WP) started out as a blogging software program in 2003, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it’s open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other OSS programs WP comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide is welcome.

WordPress 3.0April Hodge Silver establishes from the start that WP is now a fully developed publishing platform and can be used for running a blog, a commercial web site, or even used as a CMS. You can run WP on your own computer using it as a server (that’s the better option for advanced users) or you can let WordPress.com do it all for you, which means you have less control but is probably the better option for beginners or those who simply want their own blog. The ‘completeness’ of this guidance manual is that it covers all that’s required for both options.

The advantages and disadvantages of each choice are explained clearly. But in either case you will need the features and the configuration settings fully explained. They can be learned through trial and error, but the benefit of a guidance manual is that it will shorten the time involved and flatten the learning curve.

My advice in brief is this: if all you need is a blog, choose WordPress.com, but if you want to customise your site, have advertising, and take advantage of plugins and widgets – go for your own installation.

Once you reach the user-friendly WP control panel, the principles are the same for both users. Silver explains how to create a post (WP jargon for a page that you see on screen) and how to add graphics which will make it look more attractive.

The huge advantage of a program such as WP is that everything you upload is stored in a database, but you can control how it is summoned into your pages. A single graphic for instance can be presented at thumbnail, medium, or large size.

WP offers two editors in which you generate your content – one a ‘visual’ editor which requires very few skills or technical knowledge, and an HTML editor for those who know a little about coding. As soon as you start posting you’ll also start getting comment spam, but WP comes with a powerful tool called Akismet that deals with it automatically.

The control panel in WP makes all your work as easy as possible, but if you are not used to a CMS it can be difficult to conceptualise the relation between what you put in to the system and how it will appear on screen as the finished article. This guide does a good job at overcoming this problem by generous use of full scale screen shots, so you will know exactly what you should be looking at.

WP 3.0 now includes automatic menu creation. This can be used in conjunction with ‘categories’ to create the structure and the navigational system for your content. Silver then moves on to show how (free) widgets and plugins can be deployed to enhance a site. The great thing about these is that they are enhanced regularly, and can be updated with a single mouse click. And if you are really feeling ambitious you can even download a plugin to render your site ready for iPhone and iPod touch.

The central part of the book deals with the most important element of a WP site – the ‘theme’, which you lift off the shelf or develop yourself. This provides the basic structure of what your site will look like, it’s style, features, and behaviour.

Then comes the issue of developing your own plugins and widgets. As you can probably tell from this description, these issues are becoming more technically demanding, but you don’t need to know these techniques in order to create a successful site.

Silver finishes in the same technical vein – giving explanations for setting up an eCommerce site, then giving instructions for upgrading a WP installation. If you have opted for hosting on your own server, this will be invaluable, because WP is updated quite frequently, with new features and functions at every new version.

I spent a long time learning much of this the hard way – before WP manuals became available. And I certainly wish I’d had something like WordPress 3.0 Complete to hand at the time. It would have made my life a lot easier, and I would have known to get hold of the best online backup to save all my files whilst I was learning WordPress.

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© Roy Johnson 2011

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 3.0 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt, 2011, pp.322, ISBN: 1849514100

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WordPress for Business Bloggers

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promote your WordPress blog with advanced plugins, analytics, advertising, and SEO

WordPress for Business Bloggers When blogging first took off in the mid 1990s the mainstream media viewed bloggers with lofty contempt. I can remember both the BBC and the Guardian making sneering ‘get a life’ comments about bloggers daring to report their own version of news. They all said it was a self-indulgent short-term gimmick. Now, there isn’t a newspaper or broadcast organisation which doesn’t boast its own bloggers and doesn’t welcome the contribution of user-generated content.

WordPress for BusinessAt the same time, some individual blogs have become phenomenally successful. Arianne Huffington’s The Huffington Post became an instant hit as an Internet newspaper, and one-man-band UK political blogger Paul Staines proudly displays his end-of-month site visitor statistics which outstrip those of national newspapers. This sort of popularity has attracted advertising revenue, and there are now individuals whose blogs are now a full time business.

WordPress is one blogging platform which has kept pace with this development by making it easy for non-programmers to add all sorts of interactive functions via plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other open source software programs, WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from Paul Thewlis is welcome.

It’s aimed specifically at people who want to use a blog for business purposes – which means coming to grips with eCommerce, advertising, and site promotion via search engine optimization (SEO). The first part of his guide offers an upbeat account of the business possibilities for business bloggers – increased sales, contact with clients, news updates, company promotion, and so on. He makes the good point that there are now any number of different models for a successful business blog. And WordPress has all the tools you will require, from analysing your performance, promoting your blog, and managing your content, to monetizing your site with advertising revenue and affiliate programmes.

Next comes the making of a strategic blog plan, which means setting out your business objectives. The first part of this will probably be easy: you will want more visitors, more business, and more sales. But the next crucially important part is that he shows you a corresponding list of the WordPress features or plugins you will need to implement these goals.

This is followed by the technical requirements for installing WordPress on your own server, and even learning the rudiments of HTML and style sheets (CSS) in order to design your own theme. This strikes me as rather over-ambitious for beginners, who will probably be much better served by using ready-made templates (called ‘themes’ in WP jargon).

In fact he even goes further and has his aspiring eCommerce merchant editing the style sheet coding to produce an original three-column page design. I must say that it’s difficult to imagine any would-be business person who would be capable of or prepared to do this. There’s nothing wrong with someone learning a bit of coding, but a much more realistic strategy would have been to use templates.

There’s a chapter on uploading graphics which usefully explains the difference between a library and a gallery. This is another instance where the naming of functions is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. He uses the NextGEN Gallery plugin for this and video display – another example of the free add-ons which make life easier for the non-programming user.

After this fairly technical interlude, he then switches to the actual content of your site or blog – which is likely to be text. Writing for online consumption is much more skilled than most people realise, and he’s right to emphasise the need for brevity, structure, and engagement.

Yet this soft skills section too requires an explanation of a technical nicety – the difference between categories and tags, both of which are used to give taxonomy to your content. He uses the comparisons of categories being like a navigation system and tags being like index entries, which is reasonable enough.

Next he covers the arcane science of search engine optimization (SEO). Fortunately, WordPress has been designed with this in mind, but even so there’s room for a couple more plugins to make the job easier.

I’m a little bit circumspect about the social networking side of business promotion where proper, commercial sites are concerned. Sure, I can see people Twittering and Facebooking if your site is closely allied to the sort of hot, gossipy interaction that goes on in political and newspaper blogs – but I can’t see it happening if you’re selling pharmaceuticals or heavy machine engineering equipment.

He also assumes that his target business blogger is going to be engaged with all the trappings of site-linking, comments moderation, pings, and trackbacks which is another doubtful supposition – but it’s useful that he explains how to do it all, as well as how to set up a contact form using another popular plugin – cforms II.

There’s a chapter on using analytic tools to assess the performance of your blog, and another showing you how to monetize it by linking in to affiliate programs such as Google AdSense and Amazon

Almost everyone starting off a business site is likely to do so with a WordPress installation using a cheap shared hosting account. But if the business is successful, you will need to move your installation onto dedicated servers. This is a useful and intelligent inclusion in a book of this type.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010

Paul Thewlis, WordPress for Business Bloggers, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2008, pp.337, ISBN 1847195326

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WordPress for Dummies

by

from blogging platform to content management system

WordPress was first launched in 2003 as open source software designed for blogging – and it is still used as such. But as its popularity has suddenly grown exponentially, enormous numbers of add-ons and plug-ins have been developed to provide extra features. Because it’s built on a solid base of MySQL and PHP, these extra features have transformed it from an individualist tool into a major communication platform. So much so that it’s now become a content management system (CMS) which offers an alternative to Joomla and Drupal. Releases of the software are named after jazz musicians. WordPress for Dummies is a guidance manual on how to use it.

WordPress for DummiesIf you want to see the sorts of web sites which use this combination of WP + templates – look here, here, and here. This is the best of the current guides to using WordPress. The strongest point in its favour – apart from the very direct ‘for Dummies’ approach – is that it gives instructions for would-be bloggers , but also explains the more sophisticated uses of WP for those who want to build a web site using a content management system. The beauty of WordPress is that it can do both.

In fact WordPress is pretty thoughtful software – which is what’s made it so popular. All blog posts can be drafted, auto-saved, spell-checked, and stored prior to publication. The options for interacting with site visitors are endless – which is presumably why WP has overtaken Blogger. It really does have the heavy-duty functionalities of a full-scale content management system combined with the ease of use of a simple blogging platform.

Basically, this guide covers the three main options for WordPress users – the hosted service where you have a blog at WordPress.com; the free software which you download from WordPress.org; and the multi-user version. And the author, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, now makes her living designing WordPress templates – so she knows what she’s talking about.

I set up a test blog at WordPress recently [here] and can confirm that it took me less than five minutes from start to finish – and that includes uploading a picture and editing my profile.

WordPress successfully combines ease of use with a range of powerful features, so if you’re thinking of starting your own blog, WP seems to be the way to go. So the first option, of using WP for blogging, couldn’t be simpler.

Just in case you’re worried, WordPress has got nothing to do with Microsoft Word. It’s an Open Source program, and therefor free. You access the program without payment, and updates are available to you at any time without charge.

The second option of hosting the software on your own machine gives you scope to make use of lots of extra features. Many of these are free plug-ins which add extra functionality to the system. But even more important than the trimmings, this guide explains in detail the crucial installation and configuration of WordPress. This is the part most people are likely to find find difficult.

Ambitious bloggers and web designers will know that everybody wants to have an individualised theme – that’s the style and layout of what appears on screen. How to do that is explained here as well – including some rudiments of style sheets and PHP coding.

The third option is to use the most advanced, multi-user version of WordPress. This is for people who want a community of users and contributors. I came across one recently – a football enthusiasts’ site where fans email their reviews of matches directly from the game. Post-match reports are available even before they’re on the national news channels. There are three whole chapters on how to set up and administer this version of the software.

Lisa Wilson finishes with recommendations for free WordPress themes and plug-ins. All of these allow you to customise your site or blog, and add functionalities that only a professional designer could have dreamed about only a couple of years ago.

It’s almost impossible for these printed guides to keep up with the pace of software development. New features are being added whilst the book is with the printer. Just get the latest edition, and recognise that there may be differences in what appears on screen. Of course, you can always read the complete documentation at codex.wordpress.org – but if like me you prefer a proper book to consult, rather than reading off screen, then it’s all here. This book not only showed me how to use WordPress: it helped me to understand some of the fundamental structures of content management systems.

© Roy Johnson 2010

 Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies, New York: Wiley, 3rd edition 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0470592745

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