Since we first pre-launched the AppliedI blog (all of last week) and introduced it to a handful of customers we’ve had a few questions about the blog and the platform we’re using. This post will hopefully address those questions.
What server platform and blog engine are you using and why?
Our blog is currently hosted on a Windows 2003 server running IIS6 (like 90% of the rest of our network). There are many outstanding blogging engines available today and some of the most popular are: Community Server, Sharepoint, dasBlog, subText, MoveableType, WordPress and Drupal
to name a few. We opted to use WordPress for several reasons which we’ll address later. This isn’t saying WordPress is the best blogging engine available and that you should drop whatever engine you use today and move to wordpress but it definitely demonstrates that wordpress is a viable blogging solution on Windows.
WordPress uses PHP as the script engine and MySQL as the database. Windows, IIS, MySQL and PHP are often referred to as WIMP!
Why WordPress?
There is a very large community that has adopted wordpress. In fact wordpress is probably one of the most widely used blog engines available. The large number of plugins, enhancements, hacks and themes available for wordpress made it a clear choice.
One of our favorite features built into wordpress is the Akismet comment spam filter. Comment spam is when someone comes along and posts a comment in your blog for the sole purpose of creating links from your site to their site. This causes the search engines to believe your site and their site are somehow related and may have adverse affects on your own website’s search engine ranking. The AppliedI.net is a very recognized and linked to website and as such is a definite target for comment spammers and Akismet was one of the deciding factors to use WordPress. Many other blogging platforms support Akismet including dasBlog.
What features in WordPress are you using?
Today we have the following features implemented in our wordpress blog:
- Akismet for comment spam
- aLinks to provide automatic keyword linking
- FeedBurner Feedsmith to manage feed subscriptions
- Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag posts
- Translate to provide translations in various languages
- WP lightbox 2 to provide that ever so cool image popup feature
- WordPress Widgets
- Dean Lee’s permalinks ISAPI filter to provide search engine friendly text links
The theme we’re currently using is called GlossyBlue but we have a custom theme in the works.