Lynn Dye & Lisa Sabin-Wilson

Lisa was here in Oklahoma City last weekend (4-23/24-2010), for the ithemes Builder Bootcamp. She kicked off the Bootcamp by sharing how WordPress came to be as well as her background with WordPress. Something she said has really stuck with me,

“WordPress is free…and priceless at the same time.”

A simple statement that says much. Think about the flexibility and professional, or whimsical look that can be obtained by a start-up business or an everyday blogger by using WordPress.com for free or WordPress.org, where you obtain your own hosting.

I asked Lisa how she came to write her first ‘Dummies’ book. She was at SXSW (South by Southwest) in 2006 and met, quite by chance, someone from Wiley Publishing. During their conversation, it became evident to the Wiley representative that Lisa knew her stuff and she asked Lisa if she’d be interested in writing a book about WordPress. Until then, writing a book hadn’t entered her mind. In fact she mentioned to me that her 8th grade English teacher would be shocked to know she had written any kind of book!

The writing process is interesting to me, so Lisa explained that with Wiley and the ‘Dummies’ series, there are definite guidelines and formats to follow that took time to adjust to. She is grateful to all the editors, proofers and staff who guided her through that process. Now with 3 editions of WordPress and the first BuddyPress book under her belt, things go more smoothly.

I asked if any new books are in her future and she said she will be doing another book for Wiley. The title is still under wraps until July, but it is WordPress related and should come out in December—just in time for Christmas!

Lisa Gives Back to the WordPress Community

Lisa is active in the WordPress community and believes in giving back. She’s the chief organizer of the Chicago WordCamp and is invited to pretty much all the WordCamps. I learned that no travel expenses or honorariums are given to most speakers at  these WordCamps. She’s grateful that she has built a business from WordPress that supports her and her family and she enjoys traveling around the country to meet fellow WordPress enthusiasts.

Her business is WordPress focused. Lisa started her web design business in 1998. When she started using WordPress in 2003, she realized its potential and now, her business, E.Webscapes offers a wide range of blog and web services. I asked how she maintains a business along with her volunteering to attend so many WordPress related functions. She has a talented staff along with a virtual/personal assistant who work with her to make it all work. She also maintains a more personal blog at justagirlintheworld.

You can read my thoughts of the ithemes Builder Bootcamp directly below this post. I was thrilled when I read ithemes was going to do a bootcamp right here in Oklahoma City. Then when I found out Lisa was coming, that just made it all the better. I found her to be very approachable and I along with many others benefited from talking with her during the breaks and getting our books autographed. Thanks for coming to Oklahoma City, Lisa–we look forward to your next visit.

For the similarities:

• Both are hosted, which means you don’t have to find and purchase hosting from a third-party and learn how to install software. Your posts are automatically backed up for you
• Both are free
• Both give the author the ability to upload photos and videos
• Both allow submission of posts via email and mobile phone. I see there’s a WordPress iPhone app, didn’t find one for Blogger
• Both feature helpful videos, although WordPress has recently come out with WordPress.tv, which seems a cut above what Blogger has

Blogger Features:

• Use your Google account credentials to sign up for Blogger – one less account login to keep track of
• Choose a name (URL) for your blog and have the ability to easily change it later, or use your own domain name
• Add a gadget to your blog that connects your blog to your Picasa account to show off your photos (limited to Picasa photos (owned by Google)
• We mentioned the ability to embed videos in your blog – you can link to Google Video or  YouTube
• Ability to make your blog private, i.e. by invitation only. Great feature for families with kids to keep photos and family information for friends and family only
• Ability to add others as authors or administrators. An Administrator can do everything you can do (may not want this), Authors only have the ability to write, post and edit their own writings
• Ability to embed audio (podcasts) into your blog. Also provided are instructions to get your podcast into iTunes
• Wide choice of themes and Blogger makes it easy to revise your theme to customize to your needs
• If you have a blog on another platform, you won’t be able to import it into Blogger, so if your blog is somewhere else right now, you might not want to switch
• Limited to 1GB of on-line storage, (less than WordPress), but if you have your pictures linked to Picasa, that doesn’t count against your limit

WordPress Features:

• Ability to import your blog from other platforms such as Yahoo! 360, Blogger, Type-Pad, Moveable-Type and other WordPress blogs
• Over 75 themes from which to choose. If you’re handy with CSS, you can revise your template. Some templates allow custom pictures in the headers
• WordPress has Askimet spam protector. This feature saves a lot of your time and aggravation weeding and eliminating spam
• Ability to add other editors/authors and give them more specialized permissions than Blogger allows
• Ability to make the entire blog private (you can invite up to 35 people to have viewing privileges, more with a paid upgrade)
• You get 3 GB of storage (equal to about 2,500 pictures)
• Import photos and videos – link your blog to Flickr or Photobucket
• Great widgets that are super easy to add and you don’t need to worry about knowing html, such as adding an image widget

These are the main features as I see them, feel free to leave a comment with a feature that has helped you out.

If you haven’t started a blog and are thinking about it, which should you use? I’m a WordPress user. I started out with the .com and switched over to the .org (self-hosted) about 7 months ago. Before I started bloggingl I did a little research and it seemed to me then, as it does now, that WordPress seems more suited for business or semi-business use while Blogger seems more suited for personal blogs. To me, the ‘W’ icon seems more elegant than the ‘b’ icon that Blogger uses.

With WordPress, there’s room to upgrade to the self-hosted WordPress where you’ll discover endless customization and possibilities with plug-ins, e-commerce, etc. WordPress seems to attract more developers who are writing/coding great themes and plug-ins (I’m using i-Themes for my theme). WordPress conducts popular low-cost ‘WordCamps‘ all over the world. If you’re into optimizing and tracking visitors and trends, then WordPress is the platform for you. If you’re looking for more of a personal journal or a way to share pictures and stories with far-flung family and friends, I’d go with Blogger.

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for over a year now and recently downloaded the update and did some exploring  on what’s new with Writer and how it allows me to easily use its various tools to make my blog postings look great without having to know a lot of code and other technical stuff.

Live Writer isn’t a web-based app, you download it and it becomes a program/client on your computer (so you can work on your article off-line). After it’s installed, you’ll need to take a few minutes to get it synced up with your WordPress, or other blog. Look for the top line of menu settings and click on ‘blogs’ and roll down to ‘edit blog settings’. Here’s where you will need to know and enter in the url and other login information to your blog. If you do it right, you’ll get connected to your blog. If you edit/write multiple blogs, you can enter the information in for each and Writer keeps them all organized. Writer even downloads your current theme onto your desktop so you can have the experience and feel as if you’re writing on-line.

There are so many useful features, here are a few things I regularly use and find helpful:

insert picture function (after it’s inserted, you can position it, wrap text and align
do a preview of how the article will look on-line with the ‘View’ & ‘Preview’ function

easily change fonts, colors, and other formatting
add my categories, tags and publish date all from Writer
Writer has free plug-ins (reminds you of WordPress), that are easy to install and use. For this article, I installed quite a few (for example, the cool bullets I’m using and the web screen shot below)

The thing I like best is all the screen real-estate I get when composing my articles. I know you can make the box bigger in WordPress, but the feel is a bit claustrophobic for me.

The Plug-Ins are worth taking some time to scour. There were 112 of them when I looked and I think there’s something for everyone. They are in categories and there’s even a search feature to get your download quickly.

I’ve installed several of them and used the website image plug in for the above graphic. However, when I went to edit on-line, the graphic disappeared. Furthermore, when I switched from editing on my XP computer to my Vista computer, the website image plug in wouldn’t work at all. I tried installing it again and Writer seemed to know I had problems as it said it was going to do a repair – still didn’t work.

I noticed that the downloads for some of the plug ins were only in the hundreds, so they are new and evidently  bugs will need to be worked out.

You can set up Writer to automatically ping servers when you publish – one more thing to automate and not have to worry about!

If you’re a blogger, download this free app and give it a test drive. I think you’ll like it. You can also read more about it.