I honestly think that everyone should have at least one blog. Just start writing about what you know. Get into the habit of writing about everything that you do, even if you never post any of it. This blog post provides my suggestions for blogging on WordPress. Though I am often frustrated with its editor and overall UI and would never use it for anything more I honestly think that everyone should have at least one blog. Just start writing about what you know. Get into the habit of writing about everything that you do, even if you never post any of it. Though I am often frustrated with its editor and overall UI and would never use it for anything more significant than a blog, I think that WordPress is a decent platform for that one purpose, as it is designed explicitly for managing relatively unstructured content. This blog post provides my suggestions for blogging on WordPress. There really is not much to it.
One thing that you should do before blogging is pick a specific subject. Instead of maintaining a single blog about all technology, I use wslguy.net, which is mainly about Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux and related technologies such as the rust programming language, separately from deliverystack.net, which is mainly about SaaS headless CMS with .NET Core and C#.
If you do not already own a domain, buy one. Pick a domain that identifies you or the topic of your blog. You can use it for your blog, but you can also use it for email management. Specifically, configure a catchall email address for the domain to forward to an external address.
I do not have a domain registrar to suggest, but consider the administration UI, long-term pricing, other services provided by the registrar, and so forth. Consider registering your domain directly with WordPress. I do not use my domain registrar to host websites, but I do use them to host email for the domains that those WordPress websites use, for which I had to configure the domains to use WordPress nameservers.
You may still be able to blog for free on WordPress, but only using subdomains of WordPress, for example myblog.wordpress.com. I do not seem to pay for sitecorejohn.wordpress.com (migrated by WordPress from Microsoft Live Spaces), but it appears in my WordPress account.
Instead, pay for a hosting plan that lets you use your domain, such as myblog.com. For a few dollars more per month, you can get additional features such as google analytics integration, which can provide insights that WordPress default statistics do not cover. I do not know exactly what google analytics integration means, as the google statistics do not appear in WordPress. I think it just means embedding the google tracking tag.
With a hosting plan, WordPress may default to setting up what it calls a site. Work with the people at WordPress to make it more like a blog, specifically by having the home page of the site be a blog article listing page.
For technical blogs, set up a corresponding github account, or determine which github account to use for the blog. For me, wslguy does not have enough code to warrant its own github account, so it shares one with deliverystack, which may also benefit from code provided by wslguy.
To the extent possible, blog posts should be short and focus on a single topic. Consider tags that you would apply to a post. Many tags may indicate too much content for a single post. If you write about what you consider to be common sense, which is not common to everyone, you may find that you have more to write than you thought at first. I can generally expand a single sentence into an entire paragraph, which often means that a paragraph becomes a post. What you think might be single blog post may deserve a series of posts.
Beware of the slugs used to generate URLs for blog posts. You do not want to change these after publishing, as search engines could have indexed the URL paths, users may have bookmarked them, and other sites may use the URLs as links.
Spend some time getting familiar with the editing interface. I seem to use only a few types of blocks: Paragraph, Preformatted 14, Image, and Bullet. You can paste images into the editor for convenience, but I prefer to create an Image block and upload my images explicitly.
For me, WordPress preformatted blocks for code are a huge hassle. I generally compose in Microsoft Word and paste into WordPress, which converts every line of code from the document to a paragraph. It is convenient to use something like pastebin for small things and best to use github for large things, but reading code inline is convenient, so I paste small fragments of code separately from text and format them manually.
Configure google analytics before making the site public. To increase the accuracy of your web statistics, log in to wordpress.com before accessing your own sites, or at least avoid accessing the sites without authenticating, such as in private mode.
Remember to submit the blog to search engines for indexing.
If you have any additional suggestions for blogging with WordPress, please comment on this blog post.
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