One of the biggest overlooked problems with Word Press really isn’t a fault of WordPress: bad themes.
Because it is so easy to modify a theme, to customize the look, many people do- and then post their theme for others to download. Doing this can be an act of kindness- or have some ulterior motives- such as including a link back to the theme builders site- or even semi evil- by including code that delivers ad words proceeds to the theme builder.
In general, people who post themes have good intentions and there are a lot of very good themes out there. But- what are the deciding factors that make a theme good or bad? (more…)
On her “How to blog” site Emily Robbins goes to great length to compare WordPress to TypePad and comes down pretty strongly on the side of WordPress. What she fails to mention is the fundamental difference between the two.
While both store your data in a MySQL database, how they display the data is different. This is a very important difference.
Blogger, Moveable Type and Radio UserLand all generate static pages once you hit publish. The database takes your entry- and builds a static page that sits on your site just like a traditional HTML page. Every comment rebuilds the static page. If you change your theme, the server then has to regenerate the entire blog/site.
WordPress, TextPattern and LiveJournal all generate each page on the fly. You enter the data and when someone comes to your site, the page is pulled from the database using whichever theme you have selected.
While I could go into the pro’s and con’s of each system, in the on-demand, fast paced world of the Internet, I prefer the build on the fly scenario. It’s fast, it’s elegant, and it’s always fresh- it also allows for much more customization and change options since each change doesn’t require a complete regeneration of your site.
Social Network Mapping with Kartoo at D’Arcy Norman Dot Net
I read a lot of Blogs to learn about the Internet and marketing. A system administrator at the University of Calgary wrote about Kartoo– a social networking search application. It generates a very cool bunch of maps on relationships on the web- an interesting look at search. Of course I did an ego search just like he did- and saw how my sphere of influence is represented on the web. While Google is the by far the leader in Search- there are other ways to look at the web – this is why sites built with web standard code are so important- and why WordPress is such a good tool for managing at least part of your site.