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View Full Version : What makes a website a blog

taffd
06-28-2007, 10:51 PM
I've recently finished the first part of my site, having had to learn everything from scratch. I've been advised that I should have set it up as a blog. It appears to be a sort of blog already and although I've added a wordpress blog aswell, I can't get a handle on how to make the whole site one or even if I should attempt it. The site is http://www.myverdict.net.
Thanks in advance.
taffd
Have just been looking at source codes, is it something to do with RSS feed and Pingback code in the <head> bit of the page.
Pennimus
06-29-2007, 01:19 AM
Yeah it would probably make sense for it to be a blog, given the nature of the content... just set the blog as your index page, and the current home page as your "about" page.
taffd
06-29-2007, 02:09 PM
Thanks.
I can see I haven'nt been quite specific enough. Let me elucidate.
Firstly I must stress this is not an advert for my site. I can see how a blog works and can see a correlation with my site. A blog has multiple categories, my site could be said to have about 30,000 categories. Blog posts and comments would equate to questions, arguments and polls on my site. Different permissions on a blog would equate to users residential categories on my site. Hence I seem inadvertantly to have set up a sort of blog but it doesn't match exactly.
As I understand it, whenever a blog is changed pingbacks and trackbacks and all manner of spidery things occur, passing links to other blogs and increasing search engine rankings etc. I can see that the blog part of my site has code in the <head> part that pertains to pingbacks and rss feeds and assume this has something to do with it.
My question is, should I tranfer this code to my main site or attempt to change the layout of my blog page and fit my site inside the blog, as it were.
Pennimus
06-29-2007, 06:06 PM
What I would do is make the blog the whole site, so dispensing with the other pages and integrating what content there is into the blog platform, because all the features you want and more are already handled by Wordpress and the various and numerous plug ins you can get for it.

I realise that might mean a lot of wasted effort where you've already built the site but in the long run it would be much much easier for you.

You can then go on to change the theme of the blog, or download various and numerous prebuilt themes to make it more palatable visually.
taffd
06-29-2007, 06:32 PM
Thanks again. Any effort I've put in can't be described as wasted, I've had to learn elements of php, sql, database design etc and doing it my way, from scratch, meant I had to understand what I was doing as I went along. Would you believe displaying the results as I wanted them took me a month. I think my main problems will be organising the categories and permissions. A few days thinking required.