Tag Archives: blogging

wordpress.com vs. wordpress.org. Pros and cons of self-hosted blog


If you are considering to publish a blog using WordPress software, you should know that there are two main options for hosting it. Below we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each one

On one side, there is the possibility of hosting it in wordpress.com. Main things to bear in mind:

WordPress.com hosting:

  • Free if you use a wordpress subdomain, such as myblog.wordpress.com
  • Not possible to install new themes
  • Not possible to install new plugins

WordPress.com hosting:

  • You need to pay for a server
  • Use your own domain, without restrictions
  • Install your own themes
  • Install your own plugins

And what is a theme and a plugin

A theme is the look and feel of your blog. But it is a lot more, since there is some code in it, you can use your theme to achieve different behaviour in your content. For example, you can decide what categories are listed in the home, if there is a slider or not, and many more things that just the fonts or the css styles.

A plugin is an additional module that brings new functionality to your blog, allowing you for example to embed tweets in your blog with Twitget. There are a lot of plugins in https://wordpress.org/plugins/, and most of them are free to use.

Conclusion

Normally, if this is the first time you are going to blog, and you have no budget to spend, our recommendation is clear, go for a free wordpress.com account. It will also allow you to grow with their premium options.

Going for a self-hosted WordPress site requires that you have knowledge about servers and a bit of programming. You will need to configure a database, upload things to an ftp account and so on. If all of this sounds new to you, then bear in mind that you will have to learn it. It is not complex, but you need to like it or it will be heavy task. There are of course lots of professional agencies that can help you out and have a lot of experience in building a professional WordPress site.

Social content marketing tools – Create content for your blog


Engagement is the new buzzword content creation in the web. There is so much content created over the blogosphere and social media sites that quality is becoming more important over time. Curating content is crucial and we will introduce you to the social interview tool Dilmot

Companies are now fully aware that just distributing information on a regular basis is not enough. It is simple to put information into the web. You can just copy and paste it from a myriad of sites. But the difficult part is how to create content that is useful, that adds value to the reader.

As a web editor, blog writer or webmaster, you are looking for tools that make the creation of content faster, easier and more original. We want to bring your attention today on the available tools for organising on-line interviews.

How do you organise an on-line social interview?

If you want to draw attention to your website or blog, inviting your readers to an on-line interview can be a great choice. Dilmot works as a web publishing in a similar way to WordPress or Blogger. In order to post an interview you just need to fill in the basic information you want to publish such as the photo of the guest speaker, a short intro or bio and the expected date and time when the guest will be answering the questions.

At that point you will have a url that you can point at. It is also possible to include this url within another web, be it a blog, regular website or even in your Facebook page, using an iframe.

blog-many-uses-on-line-interviews

Receiving questions from your readers

Once you publish the website, you can start receiving questions from the audience. The questions can be anonymous or the user can identify herself using Facebook or Twitter
. There is also a new way of receiving questions, by using a Twitter hashtag.

Moderating the questions

In all the situations mentioned above, the interview administrator/moderator will be able to moderate the incoming questions. This means that no incoming question will be published unless the moderator approves it. The moderator can also edit the content of the question, e.g. to declutter a question or fix typos.

Answering the questions

The guest speaker will have a private access protected by username/password. With this access they can see the list of questions and start answering right away from a simple interface.

Normally you would want to present the answers in real-time, so the webapp is built in order to do so. Viewers will see the interview as if it is a real-time chat.

Editing the answers

The moderator can edit the answers in case there are typos.

Listing the interviews

Dilmot can work solely as a piece of content within your website, in what technically could be called iframe mode, or it can be published inside a full-fledged portal where there will be an agenda and the interviews will be hosted and catalogued with the appropriate tags.

So, do you want to test drive Dilmot? Get in touch with us here!

Using Dilmot inside a WordPress iFrame


If you have a blog or any site using WordPress as the content management platform, then you can easily put the Dilmot application inside a post or page. You just need to put it as an iFrame. The only caveat is that the default installation of WordPress does not allow to insert iFrames. If you put them inside the “HTML” version of the post the “iframe” tags will be eliminated when you save the post.

The workaround for this limitation is to use a plugin that allows you to do this. There are several good plugins, and we recommend using the iFrame Plugin, which you can download here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iframe/

This would be an example

[iframe src=”http://put-the-url-here” width=”100%” height=”480″]

Hope this tip helps to find new possibilities for your WordPress. And remember that Dilmot also has good integration capabilities with Facebook and Twitter.

If we can help you out with any of these ideas, don’t hesitate to contact us.