Here is the introduction to make you more eager to read it:

Wordpress became very popular with the ever growing number of blogs. People started creating all sorts of guides and tutorials for Wordpress itself. But little has been talked about security, even though it is such an important topic. For that reason I wanted to step forward and create a comprehensive Wordpress security guide.
Really, there is no reason not to follow along this guide and make your blog more secure. Think of how much it would cost you if your blog were to be hacked?

I hope you like the Wordpress security article.

Tell me what you think of it! Do you like it? Do you think such in depth articles are valuable or just a waste of time?

Along this article they will share advice as to what makes a blog successful.

The first piece of advice comes from John Chow, I am sure you know him, he makes lots of money through his blog.

Be Passionate About Your Topic

It’s hard to write about a topic you don’t like or know about. But lots of people do. They look up to people like John Chow who generates $40k through his blog on a monthly basis and think they can do the same. They do research on what he writes about and look closely at his blog. They choose the same niche John has chosen and start writing.

However that’s the wrong approach. Believe me, eventually you will run out of things to write about.

Just listen to John Chow’s advice:

The most important aspect of blogging is to enjoy the topic you’re blogging about. Too many blogger pick a topic not because they like it but because it’s the “hot” money making topic of the month. If you’re not passionate about your topics, you won’t stick with it long enough to make your blog a success.
John Chow

If you pick a topic you like you will not only write long enough but also more importantly, you won’t be able to write on a regular basis.

Michael Martin, owner of Pro Blog Design, sees a different aspect as essential to blogging, creating a blog you can be proud of.

Build Something You Are Proud Of

Blogging is a form of communication. Essentially it should please you to write and create content. If it doesn’t, then there is something you do wrong:

To me, the most important aspect of blogging is building something that you
yourself are proud of. I’m going to assume that you are blogging about a
topic you love. If that’s the case, forget about trying to please some
imaginary “average reader.” Just please yourself.

If your articles aren’t something that you are proud of and would read, then
don’t expect anyone else to. Same goes for your design. But if you build a
site that you yourself would love, then finding others will do too won’t be
hard.
Michael Martin

Creating a blog you love takes lots of effort. And this on a daily or weekly basis since you want your articles to uphold a certain standard of quality. But once you are used to the blog routines, blogging should become a lot easier.

Focus on Useful and Unique Content

Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips takes a different approach:

Blogging is nothing more than a form of web publishing. The most important aspect of blogging, therefore, has to be the content.

More specifically I always say that the content of successful blogs is both useful and unique.
Daniel Scocco

For Daniel it’s the content that creates a successful blog. Of course this is very true. Successful blogs always contain useful and also original content. Keep this in mind when building a blog.

The ultimate idea we can then get from these highly successful bloggers is that: You should love your blog and every article you publish. This also means rejecting or editing posts that you are not proud of. You further shape your blog the way you want it to be. Through design but also through articles, to the point  where you are truly proud of your blog.

Every blogger is talking about Wordpress. Every blogger would recommend it to you. But what is it? What does it do? Should you use it? I hope you find answers to these questions in this article.

Wordpress in General

Wordpress is a system that helps you manage the content you present on your web site. Because of that it is also referred to as a Content Management System or CMS.

A Content Management System lets you create, manage, edit and publish content in a organized manner. It does this in a straight forward way. Especially in Wordpress you can control every aspect of the web site through a nice control panel.

Another aspect that makes it so great, is that it’s free. You don’t have to pay anything.

Who Should Use Wordpress?

If you are sick of having to manage all your HTML files yourself or you do not know a lot about the technical side of a web site, then Wordpress will be very useful to you.

It is great for people who do not like doing technical stuff. On the other hand it is also good for web developers. They can create plugins to extend Wordpress’ default functionality to suit their needs.

Ultimately Wordpress is useful for everyone.

Requirements

Wordpress itself does have some technical requirements. If you want to know whether Wordpress could be installed on your web server than just ask your web host about the following aspects:

• PHP 4.3 or greater
• MYSQL 4.0 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

Most web hosting companies meet these requirements but it cannot hurt to ask before signing up for a hosting service.

Blogging with Wordpress

Wordpress is mostly used for blogs these days. The reason being that it was originally developed for this task.

Therefore blogging with Wordpress is extremely easy once you get the hang of it. There is not a whole lot you can do wrong. If you don’t want to end up destroying your blog while trying a few things out then I would recommend installing Wordpress offline.

Other Wordpress Uses

BuddyPress is an extension of Wordpress. All it does is to add specific plugins to your Wordpress blog. These plugins serve to make your web site more social through adding functions such as private messaging.

Wordpress is also used as an e-Commerce site. Again there are several plugins that help you in creating a e-Commerce web site.

Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress for its part is also very flexible. This flexibility comes in the form of plugins.

Everyone is allowed to create plugins. If you have a great plugin idea then go ahead and create it. In order to do that though your plugin needs to fulfill certain requirements. Therefore if you are seriously interested in developing plugins you should visit Wordpress’ knowledge base.

All new Wordpress plugins will be listed in the Plugin Directory.

How to Style Your Blog Differently

Wordpress themes are a way to style your blog differently. These themes are basic PHP files containing some special Wordpress modifiers. Therefore Wordpress themes look  almost the same as normal PHP web pages.

Themes are made up of multiple pages, some of which are necessary. Every theme should at least include these files:

style.css
header.php
index.php
footer.php
sidebar.php
comments.php


Today there are so many themes available for Wordpress it is hard to know where to start with. I personally recommend two web sites:

• Woothemes – This web sites offers mostly Wordpress themes you have to purchase, but they also have some free themes available.
• DailyBlogTips – This is a blog which offers many free Wordpress themes.

Depending on your needs I recommend to go to either one of the web sites. However if you are not so much into the technical side of a blog then I recommend purchasing themes from Woothemes. Their advantage is that everything is already built-in and you can change stuff without the need of editing source code.

Wordpress.org vs Wordpress.com

Everyone doing research about Wordpress will eventually come to ask himself whether there is a difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.

Yes, there is a small but significant difference between these two web sites. Wordpress.org offers the free content management system I’ve been talking about. On the other hand Wordpress.com is a web site that offers free blogs that use Wordpress.org as the blog management system.

In a simple sentence: Wordpress.org  is the software Wordpress.com uses to provide free blogs for visitors.

Has this article helped you in understanding Wordpress better? Was it of any use?

Everyone who wants to start his own web site needs to have some kind of web host. Depending on what you are looking for, there are free hosting services or hosting you have to pay for.

But even if you have already decided on whether you want free or paid hosting, there are still a lot more questions that need to be answered.

What type of hosting plan should I pick? How much is it going to cost?

To find an answer to these questions I advice you to read through this article step by step.

First of all, to find a hosting plan that suit your needs, you first need to figure out your needs.

Find Your Needs

Take a minute and think about your needs concerning a web host. Is web site speed most important to you? Do you need a lot of bandwidth? Should the web host be as cheap as possible? Write your answers down.

The time invested in figuring out your needs will be worth it at the end. Through this process it will be much easier for you to find a web host that fits your needs.

Types of Hosting

Depending on your needs there are several different kinds of hosting. Read along and take a look at your list of needs. At the end of the section you should be able to decide what kind of hosting would be best for you.

Free Web Hosting

This is the cheapest form of hosting. It doesn’t cost you anything.  It’s also simple, you sign up and you can get started. I would only suggest this type of hosting when you want to look whether it would make sense for you to create a web site. But even then it would make more sense to use shared web hosting.

There are lots of problems with this type of hosting. Usually your web site will contain some sort of advertisement. The reason behind this is simple, because the hosting is free. Another problem is that you are very limited in your choices. Most of the time these web sites don’t support PHP or other dynamic web sites. Furthermore you can’t use your own domain. Your web site is usually a sub domain of the hosting web site.

In the end these web hosts are also pretty slow.

Shared Web Hosting

This is the most common type of web hosting used on the Internet. In this case, your web site is placed on a server along with hundreds or thousand of other web pages. All these domains share the same CPU and RAM.

Shared web hosting is very cheap compared to other types of hosting. Most hosting companies offer lots of features by default such as  databases, coupons for other services and sometimes even automated backup.

The drawback of shared hosting is that usually your web site will be not extremely fast. The reason being that the resources of the server are shared among other web sites.

For me though this is the best kind of hosting for beginners.

Virtual Private Server

Hosting of this type doesn’t give you your own private server. It rather divides a server into multiple virtual servers. For each virtual server resources are allocated such as RAM and usage of CPU.

Of course it has some drawbacks: This kind of service is more expensive than shared web hosting. It also requires more technical knowledge.

On the other hand you usually have full control over the server. You can switch off services to save memory and CPU which makes it easier to speed up your web site. Further the owner of a virtual private server (VPS) has direct access to his server.

Hosting Plans

There are several different hosting plans which differ extremely from host to host. Ultimately which plan you should choose totally depends on your needs.

In this table I listed several web hosts, including how much bandwidth,storage and other features they offer. It also includes the price of each hosting plan. Notice that here I only included hosting plans for shared web hosting.

I myself use Startlogic since they are quite cheap and have a great support.

Research Web Hosts

Now that you have probably chosen a hosting plan it is time to do some research about this host.

One of the measures I use is to contact the host and ask a question. A good host should reply within 24 hours.

Even make distinctions between what they write and how they write it. If it’s an automated message than chances are that it is not going to help you. If it’s a friendly and human-written answer, then this just might be your host.

Another step to take is to search for hosting reviews. The only problem I have with all the review sites is that they are too commercial. It seems they are more interested in making money then in providing valuable reviews.

I would recommend visiting Web Hosting Rally and looking at their best hosts. But watch out, the reviews they offer are not from customers. Therefore dig further. Search for customer hosting reviews.

From what I’ve found Web Hosting Review Blog seems to provide some valuable information. Especially since customers can vote on the different web hosts.

Here are some more review sites that you might find useful:

• Cnet’s Hosting Reviews
• FindMyHost
• Customer Hosting Reviews

What kind of web hosts have you used? Which one was the best?

In order to make this blog even better I thought of creating a content policy. This policy is not only useful for me. It is also for you, for all my readers. It is supposed to give you an overview of what you can expect from this blog.

And I hope that through this policy you will see why it takes so long to create and publish new posts.

This is essential since I want to create a higher standard of quality on my blog. And that’s what I hope this policy will help to uphold.

Here are some of the main ideas of my content policy:

1. The topic of an article will be researched in depth
2. Articles will cover a topic thoroughly
3. Articles will be at least around 500 words
4. A number of valuable links will be included in every article
5. Articles are written for You!

The last point of this policy is especially important to me. I write articles for you to learn new things. To present you different views on a topic or things you didn’t know about before.

The only problem is that it usually takes a lot of time to write and publish an article. Because you want to present content to your reader, you ultimately get under pressure.

Under this pressure the quality of your articles suffer. In order to not put me under such as pressure I will take more time to write posts.

What do you think? Is this policy useful?

Some people hate to write. Some actually love it. People love it because it is a form of communication. Further writing offers you a way to express your feelings and become more conscious of yourself.

No matter why you like to write, there are several steps you can take to improve your articles.

Thorough Research

Before you even start writing an article you should do research. Research includes not only collecting information about a topic. It also means searching for different views of people on a topic. When writing on the Internet, it also includes searching for valuable links for your readers.

By providing links to interesting articles you not only get attention but you also give your readers the possibility of diving deeper into the topic.

I researched a lot for this post and found several very useful tips on how to create better articles. I include these links because, not only do they provide more content for interested readers, but they also acknowledge the work of other people.

Take Your Time

The next step is to spend time. The more time you spend on an article the better it is going to be. It’s that simple.

You cannot expect to have written a good article within 30 minutes. Great posts will take up lots of time. First of all you need time for outlining the article ideas. The next step is to do some additional research on the topic you are talking about. Then you head over to actually writing the article.

But wait, you are still not done. It follows adding images, proof reading, refining and editing the article. And this over and over again.

Bottom line: Simply take time to create a truly unique article.

Find Awesome Pictures

Images are a very important part of your article. They create focus points for your readers. Because all the immediate attention is focused on images, it is important that they underline or reflect key aspects of your article.

There are different ways you can find great pictures but one way is to use Flickr. Skellie has written an excellent article on how to find great pictures via Flickr.

In general you can not only use Flickr but also lots of other sources to find images that suit your needs. I occasionally use stock.xchng to find pictures, as all of the photos provided there, are free.

Write with Your Readers in Mind

This aspect is also essential for creating great content or articles for that matter. If you do not aim at writing for your readers than where is the purpose in writing an article?

Writing is essentially a form of communication. You want to share your thoughts and your point of view with other people. Further you expect the very same from other people. If you don’t want to communicate, then don’t write.

I would still guess most people want to write. Therefore it’s necessary to think about your readers.

Ask yourself some questions. Is this really the kind of content that I want to publish on my blog? Does it fit to my previous articles?

Only Publish Articles You Like

This is another important lesson. People tend to publish posts even when they are not happy with them in the first place. This is a huge mistake. It’s actually not a problem for yourself but rather for your readers. They have to read what you wrote. You don’t

Therefore it’s easy to write articles that you aren’t satisfied with. Articles that reach your level of quality are way harder to create. Because most people do not take this route, it’s ultimately a way you can distinguish yourself from other people.

Taking time to write an article doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have fun doing so. Your happiness should be supported by your writing. And that’s why you should write about topics that you are enthusiastic about.

If you don’t really care, don’t write. If you are a student and everybody is talking about exams and papers and you simply don’t care, let it be. If your job bores you, it will bore us. (If you despise your job with a rich, enduring passion, that’s another thing entirely!) Write for yourself; you are, in the end, your most important reader.

This is an important lesson as no one forces you to write if you don’t like to. In the end you personally need a reason to write otherwise there is no point in writing at all.

If you want to dig deeper into this topic I suggest reading some tips from professional writers.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Obviously WolframAlpha aims at answering questions not by providing links to web sites (they actually do link to web site, but only to a few) but by presenting aggregated data.

How Does it Work?

WolframAlpha is based on the Mathematica core which took around 20 years to develop. WolframAlpha automatically detects what kind of information you are interested in by using the keywords you typed in.

For example let’s say you typed in John. WolframAlpha’s engine will then automatically detect that John is a name and thus it will return information about the name John back to you. To make it clear that you want information about a name use name John as a query and it should return the same information.

It works the same with different keywords such as countries. Enter france into the search box and hit enter. Again you should see information popping up but this time concerning a country, i.e. France.

You can further compare names or countries to each other just by entering USA France into the search field.

If you are completely new to WolframAlpha it might be best to get used to it by taking a look at the query examples.

There is also an interesting article on SEOBook about the new search engine which is worth to look at.

Conclusion

In my opinion it is a very successful approach as a search and knowledge engine. I think it would be even more effective if the company would start to create country specific versions of the web site, which they are probably working on at the moment.

Overall WolframAlpha is something totally different compared to other search engines and that’s what makes it so interesting. I am further very interested in how WolframAlpha will change in the future.

What do you think of WolframAlpha?

Every blogger knows about search engine optimization these days. Most of these people try to really optimize their blogs but some fail because they use special software or certain blogging platform, e.g. Blogspot.

Because there are only few guides that exist for improving your search engine ranking with Blogspot blogs I will cover some of the main aspects that should ultimately improve your ranking.

Basic Optimization

There are lots of different aspects that you should change on your blog in order to rank better with search engines.

Structure Your Text

This is actually a not so obvious thing to do but it is extremely important for humans and for search engines.

With structuring your text I mean that you should make part of the text stand out from the rest, e.g. headlines. You should wrap your headlines in <h1>, <h2> or <h3> tags depending on how important the headline is (h1 being the most important). Headlines are also great for dividing text.

You should further underline text or make it bold or italic to set it apart from the other content. Do you notice how I used headlines in this article to mark important sections?

Header and Description Optimization

Go to your control panel, to Settings -> Basics then enter the title and a keyword rich description of your blog.

You then of course need to save the changes you made. This is one step that is essential for ranking better with search engines.

Let Search Engines Find Your Blog

Another very simple step you could take is to go to your dashboard again to Settings -> Basics and then look for Add blog to our listings and Let search engines find your blog and make sure both of these options are set to Yes.

Title Optimization

The default Blogspot titles are not optimized for search engines and that is why we need to change them. Here is what we are going to change:
Default Blogspot Title: Blog Title: Post Title
SEO Post Title: Post Title: Blog Title
SEO Homepage Title: Blog Title – Keywords
We are only going to use the two latter titles since they are constructed for SEO purposes.

This might seem like a small difference but search engines actually pay a lot of attention to the first few words of your title, therefore is this change necessary.

To implement this change we need to replace the old code including the title tags with the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/> - Keyword1 - Keyword2</title>
</b:if>

The code above checks to see whether the page loaded is an article page and then uses the SEO post title. Otherwise it loads the homepage SEO title.

Now the last part between the <b:else/> and the </b:if> only shows up on your Homepage. Therefore you should add some keywords and replace Keyword1 etc. with keywords that you want your Blogger blog to rank for, e.g. you could replace Keyword1 with Internet Marketing.

If you are not using advanced blogger templates then go ahead and use this code, taken from an excellent article on Blogspot SEO:

<title><MainPage><$BlogTitle$></MainPage><ArchivePage>
<$BlogPageTitle$></ArchivePage>
<itempage><blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></blogger>
</itempage></title>

Change Your Meta Data

The meta data is another way to tell search engines what your web site is about. The <meta name=”description”> offers you a way to sum up your web sites in a few words (around 160 characters).

The keywords tag <meta name=”keywords”> gives you the possibility to do the same as above just by using keywords.

In order to make it easier for you I’ve provided some code for rather old Blogspot templates:

<MainPage><meta name="description" content="<$BlogDescription$>" />
</MainPage><ArchivePage><meta name="description"content="<$BlogPageTitle$>
Archive, <$BlogDescription$>" /></ArchivePage><ItemPage>
<meta name="description" content="<Blogger><$BlogItemTitle$>
</Blogger> - <$BlogTitle$>" /></ItemPage>

If you are using new advanced Blogger templates then I recommend going ahead and using this code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta name="description" content="this is the blog description" />
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />
</b:if>

This code was taken from a different Blogger SEO guide.

Optimizing Your Links

Everyone uses links but there is one thing you need to know about them. First of all when linking to an article of yours or of somebody else, it is always advisable to change the link anchor text to something that contains keywords that you want to rank for. Here is an example of a bad anchor text:

<a href="http://myhomepage.com/image-editing">This is the Link Anchor Text</a>

In this case, let’s assume that the article located under the URL from above is about image editing. Linking to it with the following anchor text would be much better than the above, in terms of SEO.

<a href="http://myhomepage.com/image-editing">A New Image Editing Guide</a>

Notice how the keywords image, editing and guide are included. This is for SEO purposes.

One way to take this even further is to add a title attribute to the link. The title attribute is the text that will be shown when people hover over the link. Usually it is advisable to include a similar text as the anchor text:

<a title="Image Editing Guide" href="http://myhomepage.com/image-editing">
A New Image Editing Guide</a>

Of course you can vary a little bit to make it look more human but that should be a good way to increase your search engine ranking.

Improving Images Tags

One way you can improve the ranking of your pictures is to add the alt attribute to your pictures. Actually it is necessary to do so since otherwise the HTML code will be invalid. Add keywords to the alt attribute as shown in the section above.

<img src="http://myhomepage.com/image_editing_guide.jpg"
alt="image editing guide" />

Change the File Name of your Pictures
Another way to optimize images is to use a descriptive file name. Again instead of using a file name such as DSC_001.jpg you could change it to image_editing_guide.jpg if the file is about image editing.

Adding a Related Post Plug-in

Related posts are a great way to show readers what other content you have similar to the one they just viewed. When using Wordpress there a lots of these plug-ins but on Blogspot the whole thing is a little more complicated.

Luckily there is a way to add related posts to your blog, just follow the steps outlined in the related posts article.

Comment Optimization

You do not have a lot of options with which you can optimize comments in Blogspot. However there are a few changes that you can make to get a lot more and better comments.

First of all one of the things people keep complaining about is that on Blogger blogs only registered users can post comments but there is actually a way that other people can post comments too.

Again visit your dashboard and go to Settings -> Comments and enable the showing of comments (should be enabled by default), otherwise the all the comments will be hidden.

Then go down further to the section Who Can Comment? and click on Anyone.

In the next section (shown in the picture above) choose the option Embedded below post to add the comment form to the article footer.

Feed Optimization

The RSS feed is very important on blogs since that is the way your followers receive articles. In Blogspot you are very limited to enchance your feed but there are still a few options you can change.

To change a few options go to your dashboard and then click on Settings -> Site Feed. Set the option Allow Blog Feeds to Full in order to gain more RSS subscribers.

Then go to the section below labeled Post Feed Redirect URL and enter a URL if you are using a special feed service such as Feedburner.

Conclusion

This article covered some very basic techniques and also some more advanced ones. If you are still not sure whether what you are doing is right than just contact me via Twitter or leave a comment.

Days after days I tried to play around with my Wordpress theme but I always had to log into my Wordpress blog. The problem was that it was not only slow to always change code in the Editor section, but it always changed the appearance of my blog.

This eventually led me to find a way to use Wordpress offline. Using it offline has a lot of advantages:

• you do not use up your bandwidth
• it is a lot faster
• it just changes your local theme and does not change the look of your online blog

There is just one problem with installing Wordpress offline. You usually need a server to run Wordpress as it uses PHP, which is a programming language that is used on most web servers.

After trying several things out I became aware of XAMPP which solves the issue mentioned above.

What Is XAMPP?

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.

XAMPP is really useful as it packages all the necessary files in one distribution and makes the installation very simple.

Now let’s look at the steps you need to take in order to get your offline Wordpress blog working.

Download XAMPP

Go and visit Apache Friends to download XAMPP. There are several different downloads depending on your platform.

Installation

After having downloaded XAMPP, double click on the file (in Windows). This should open up a new Window and start the installation.

Default installation start page in Windows

Click Next to go to the next page. There you should be able to choose to which location you want to install XAMPP. If want to change the default location then click on Browse…

Choose the directory to which you want to install XAMPP

Again choose the Next button to get to the next page. Here you are prompted with options such as whether to add an icon to your desktop or not. Select the options you like and then click on Install.

Afterwards your computer should start to install XAMPP. When it’s done just click on Finish to close the installation.

XAMPP should now be installed so let’s take a look at making it ready for Wordpress.

Running XAMPP

If you chose to add an icon to your Desktop then just double click on it, otherwise go to Programs -> Apache Friends -> XAMPP -> XAMPP Control Panel. You should now see a control panel similar to the one below.

XAMPP control panel

Click on the two Start buttons next to Apache and MySql to start both of these servers. Now open up a browser after the servers are started. Type in the address: http://localhost/. You should now see a different control panel for XAMPP.

XAMPP default browser page

XAMPP Security

In order to make XAMPP more secure go to http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php . There you can change XAMPP’s default passwords.

Change the default passwords

It is very important to change the default passwords!

Setting Up the Database

The next step to take is to go back to the XAMPP browser panel (http://localhost/). In the navigation bar search for phpMyAdmin and click on it. A page similar to the one below should appear.

phpMyAdmin login page: Enter your username and password

Add your user name and password into the boxes and click on Go.

After logging in, you have to create a new database. Look at the MySQL localhost section at which there should be section for you to create a new database. Let’s call the new database wordpress. Instead of the default MySQL connection collation choose utf8_unicode_ci (all the way at the bottom), then hit Create.

Create a Wordpress database

We now have created our Wordpress database. All we now need to do is to download Wordpress.

Install Wordpress

After downloading Wordpress go to the directory where you have installed XAMPP. Then click on the htdocs folder to switch to it. You now have to extract all the Wordpress files into a subdirectory of htdocs. You can do this by creating a subdirectory (of htdocs) named wordpress. If you choose to use a different  subdirectory then you must adjust the blog path (http://localhost/wordpress/) at the end of the tutorial according to it.

Go to the wordpress directory and open up wp-config-sample.php in a text editor (Notepad will do just fine). You only need to change three lines, i.e. DB_NAME, DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD.

Change the default DB_NAME to wordpress, the database which we have created earlier. Then enter your phpMyAdmin username into DB_USER (the default is root) and also your password into DB_PASSWORD.

Change the default Wordpress config settings

You don’t need to change DB_HOST since it is already set to the right host, i.e. localhost. Now you need to save the file as wp-config.php and you should be done setting up.

Before you can start though you probably need to go to http://localhost/wordpress/ (your blog address) and follow the default Wordpress instructions to complete the Wordpress installation.

You should then be able to visit your blog at http://localhost/wordpress/ and your Administration panel  at http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/ .

In general I would divide the several types of bloggers into 3 categories, the first being what I would like to call social media chasers. The other two are hybrid and readership bloggers.

The Social Media Chasers

Jacob Gube or the guys from Smashing Magazine would fit into this category. Typically their articles are rather long and are made to become popular on social media web sites. One commonly used post type is that of creating lists, for example a list of 20 beautiful photographs.

These blogs have created an audience that is deeply involved in using social media. You can see this if you just take a look at the number of times their articles become popular on Digg and other web sites, it’s almost every single article.

Readership Bloggers

A perfect example of readership bloggers is Maki from Dosh Dosh. All he does is to write long article that cover a topic in detail. He aims at providing valuable content to his loyal readers which you can also see by the number of comments he receives on each article.

The difference to the social media chasers is that people like Maki do not aim at getting to the frontpage of Digg. The articles are also written with the reader in mind.

Hybrid Bloggers

Bloggers that do both of the above are called hybrid bloggers. They create articles destined for social media from time to time but they also create readership articles.

Depending on their feeling they decide whether to write for social media or “only” for their readership. Darren Rowse is probably a good example for that since he does both.

Conclusion

In the end I guess you have to make a decision as to what kind of blogger you want to become. Currently I would place myself in the hybrid blogger category but I aim at creating a loyal readership blog.