Tutorial Blog

WordPress is a free personal publishing platform. It is an easy to use, fast and flexible blog script. It comes with a great set of features, designed to make your experience as a publisher as pleasant as possible. With WordPress you can easily:

• Publish and edit posts;
• Sort articles in categories;
• Search within your content;
• Manage user access;
• Change your website themes and more.

You can use program available at WordPress

We will introduce you to the new buzzword in the Internet content management world. Since its invention in 1990, the World Wide Web has become the biggest repository of information. The total amount of information stored in servers located in different places on earth is tremendous and we can’t even imagine it! With this ample information, it is really difficult to find out what is necessary for us. The evolution of search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Lycos make it a bit easier to locate the information. However, it’s really a big job to deliver content to your readers and to read the necessary data. To keep yourself up to date with this vast amount of information you need an easy way to proceed.

Feeds were developed to address this problem. RSS feeds basically provide information about a web-based resource, its URL, its title, a short description, and sometimes links to other documents that are relevant to it. In this chapter, we will discuss how feeds can change the concept of content delivery, content aggregation, and how to stay up-to-date using feeds. Feeds are now so developed that you can deliver almost any type of content with them.

What are Feeds All About?

A few years ago you used to receive up-to-date news in your mailbox. You couldn’t avoid reading those big emails for valuable news. However, these mails were stored in the mailbox in such an unstructured and haphazard manner that tracing them for later use was really a big job. Most of the time, those mails were considered as one-time reading. Moreover, searching through mailboxes is sometimes not flexible and private business mailboxes are usually not big enough to store these big newsletters.
Yet another way of keeping yourself up to date is just visiting the website and checking manually if there is anything recent. However, there is no guarantee that you didn’t overlook any item. In this process, you have to check the whole site to find out what’s new.

Here comes the magic of feeds. Feeds are a short summary of content presented in a pre-defined structured way that tells you exactly what is new and up to date. Using feed aggregators (software that can read feeds), you can always stay up to date. You can even listen to podcasts using your feed aggregator. If you know what is new, you will not bother to do a manual search for information. Feeds were invented to deliver recent news to visitors and to avoid the boredom of searching for information.

When someone makes a comment in your posts, you can see only his or her name. Any person posting comments using your email address must be you. So in whichever blog you make comments using an email address that belongs to you, it indicates that the person who made those comments is you. So an email address is a unique ID of a person.

When someone makes a comment in WordPress, by default you can only see his or her name and email address. It will be more pleasing if you can see his or her avatar in this comment. An avatar is a small image chosen by someone as his or her picture. It may be an image of anything. However, usually a person uses as an avatar a picture that he or she thinks best represents himself or herself.

Gravatars came from this idea. Gravatar means “Globally Recognized Avatar”.

Gravatar is mainly a site that hosts your avatar as a URL from its site. You can upload your avatars into the gravatar website and get an ID against your email account. You can change your avatar anytime. You can also rate your gravatar for different audiences like “G” or “R” as suitable to all.

When someone who has an account in gravatar against his/her email address makes a comment in a blog, the blog engine searches the gravatar repository with his or her email address and finds the avatar. Then that blog engine displays the avatar (or gravatar) in every comment he or she has made in the blog.

This is a fantastic feature for every blog engine. Gravatars are known worldwide and almost all the big blog engines have the capability to include this feature. From the gravatar site, there are plug-ins available to add this feature to different blog engines. There is also a plug-in for adding this feature to WordPress.