I am really impressed on how flexible WordPress can be, and also, the amount of things that go into blogging! I never realized that there was so much to blogging…I only thought it was a thing where you would write down your thoughts for the world to see, but now I know that there’s more to it than that! I really like the tags feature, which does not come standard with WordPress. As one person said on the WordPress forums, “You should have a few general categories, and a lot of tags.” This made sense, because I was making a lot of categories to put posts in, but it seemsed too bloated, since some posts can go into many different categories, and setting them up with tags was a great idea. Categories are things that will classify posts, generally. Tags can be custom for each blog post, which make sense, since it would be stupid to make a seperate category for a subject which I just talk about once.

…and look what we have here! As you’ll notice, each time I mention WordPress, I link to the WordPress site, but I do this manually. As I was writing this, I wondered if there was a plugin to do this automatically, like, scan through my post and look for some keywords, and automatically link them. Enter aLinks (Auto Links). It seems like this guy knows how to code stuff! I’ll post in a bit with the results…oooohhhh! It also seems to have a plugin feature for Wikipedia, etc. These are called modules. Now I’m really excited! I’ll be back in a flash!

Oh man, this is AWESOME! The aLink plugin works great! I also decided to check the Edit N Place plugin, which is made by the same guy. This allows you to edit your posts directly on the front page instead of it (by ‘it’ I mean there is a link near every post when I login in on the front page letting me easily edit a post) bringing you to the backend to edit posts. Of course, this convenience comes at a price: you can’t upload pictures, but, no biggie! Even the author said that it was supposed to be used for quick additions for fixing typos, etc.

Again, AWESOME!

UPDATE: Hmmm, it seems like this plugin has a bug where it delete the post’s title when you edit it, so I have to keep reinserting the title when I edit a post. It also doesn’t like double quotes in titles (I haven’t tried single quotes). Sorry Edit N Place, but it seems like you’ve got to be disabled. On a side note, aLink seems to have a small bug as well, but not so major that I would delete it. I set it so no matter how many times I would say certain words in a post that it would always make them links, but it only does it once. I read the help file, and it turns out you have to define a word or phrase multiple times for it to be linked to multiple times. No thanks. I’m fine with it linking once, plus I think it would get annoying to keep having the same word linked over and over again throughout a post…it would make it seem like one of those sites which highlights words and makes them link to specific things for advertising purposes. Again, no thanks.

I can remember a couple days ago when I was trying to decide on what blogging software to use, and I dismissed WordPress due to its lack of plugins, but that was by proxy through my cousin (who will post here once his computer is built). It just goes to show you that that old adage is true: “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”