Setting up a WordPress Blog for a Class
Posted in Blog, Blogs/Wikis, E-learning, News, ResourcesPosted on September 16th, 2008 by Brian
There are two versions of Wordpress Blogs that an educator can use: A free WordPress.com hosted blog, or a server-side blog (used by professional bloggers) that uses its own domain name. Each type requires a different set of set-up instructions and skills.
Setting up a hosted WordPress.com Blog
If you’re creating your first blog and don’t have a great deal of technical expertise, then it’s best to set one up through the hosted blog service Wordpress.com. Using this free service, you can have your blog in a ready-to-use state within 15 minutes.
To accomplish this you must first set up an account. Click on this online article for detailed instructions on how this is easily done.
Other popular hosted blogging platforms include Blogger, Typepad and Vox.
Wordpress.com essentially “hosts” your blog at their domain. They make creating a blog easy by providing well-designed templates, a choice of presentation designs (known as Themes), a web address and rich text editors that allow you to create posts without any special technical knowledge.
However, there are some cons to using a WordPress.com’s hosted blog:
1. Unlike their server-side counterparts, a hosted blog doesn’t allow you to play around with it’s design templates. If you have a great deal of technical expertise and would like total control of your blog’s look, you may feel limited by a hosted blog.
2. WordPress.com incorporates its host name into your blog’s URL address (i.e. www.yourblogname.wordpress.com).
3. You don’t have access to site folders on this blog site, meaning you can’t FTP media or webpages, nor download or upload them from your hard drive.
Setting Up a server-side WordPress Blog on a Server
To accomplish this requires several things:
a) A registered domain name
b) A web host (preferably one that offers WordPress as an install option (e.g. Plesk), allowing WordPress to be installed in a few clicks, and maybe typing in a password and an email address for the account. Very simple.
c) An FTP application. I recommend the free Filezilla for FTP, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Although requiring a great deal more technical expertise and time, a server-side blog offers you total control over your blog. More importantly, you will always have the files of content contained within your blog - allowing you to archive them for prospertity or transfer them to another blog or other web hosting service.
Read this article for a detailed description of how to set up a server-side WordPress blog .
September 16th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Interesting thoughts. Brian and I worked together on setting up a SharePoint blog and comparing that to the WordPress blog. Both were really easy to set up and use, allowed you to post a variety of media types, and allowed for tags (which the administrator can specify) and comments. For me the benefits of SharePoint were the flexibility of permissions, the ease of setup (no registration, login etc.). That view might be skewed by experience with SharePoint.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Wordpress is a wonderful application and even for a novice it’s not that hard to install it yourself. Wordpress.com is a great service but you do give up some control. With a self-hosted you take the responsibility but you do get more flexibility too. Good post Brian!, I hope more teachers will look at Wordpress for their teaching and research. And even though Wordpress is a blogging software it can be used for so much more.
September 16th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Wordpress seems to be the king of ease when it comes to setting up blog sites. SharePoint also provides users with a blog template, it is not as widget rich as Wordpress etc… and it is only internal available at college, however it may provide faculty a way of getting over cultural openness issues and student monitoring issues. Blogs can also be set up a home.live.windows using your hotmail account. It also gives you a sharepoint style document library, I am going to use it for project groups
September 16th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Hey Magnus, I just clicked on your name link and was taken to your Shufflegazine site. Wow - it’s really impressive. What’s more it demonstrates what you say about WordPress blogging software being used for so much more; this site is built on WordPress! (Correct me if I’m wrong- but your source code indicates this to be true).