Class Blog
In this unit and throughout this course students will create a research blog dedicated to posting original writing and investigations in to the world of web design. Students will research and post discoveries and reflections on a range of digital art, design and technology related topics and contemporary practitioners in order to strengthen vocabulary, increase critical inquiry and consider how creative practices impact the contemporary media landscape.
Students will create these blogs with Wordpress, another platform that is often used to create quick user-friendly websites. We'll be using it throughout this course as a blogging platform, but first an important distinction:
There are two Wordpresses
Wordpress.com is a free blogging platform that is where a lot of people cut their teeth in the world of blogging and web design. When you create a site with Wordpress.com you end up with a site like "http://my-awesome-site.wordpress.com" and like other visual editors, there is a paid upgrade to get your own domain name (e.g. "[http://my-awesome-site.com"](http://my-awesome-site.com")\) and let the Wordpress team handle the behind the scenes stuff.
Like most visual editors and blogging platforms, Wordpress.com offers a backend that authors can use to log-in and post new content. The backend isn't visible to the public and is essentially an application that runs in your web browser. The actual website that people see online is called the frontend.
Wordress.org, or simply "Wordpress" is the application that builds the sites on Wordpress.com. Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS), which is a web application that allows multiple users, unique frontend/backend interfaces, and other powerful features. The other popular CMS you may have heard of is Drupal.
Wordpress is an open-source CMS, which means you can download the files required to run the application for free—you'll just need somewhere to upload them to create an actual website (which is usually not free). When you're managing those files yourself, you can edit them to create virtually any website you can imagine. This requires coding in PHP, which is not the focus of this course, but it's important to know that many people use Wordpress to create fully fledged websites—not just blogs—and that 27% of the top 10 million websites are built with Wordpress. If you plan to go into web design, there's a good chance you'll work with Wordpress in this more advanced way at some point, but for now we're just going to use it as a simple blogging tool.
Luckily, Penn State has a great service for creating Wordpress sites called Sites at Penn State.
Sites at Penn State
We'll talk more about how to use Wordpress on the next page, but first let's go over how to set up a Wordpress site through Sites and Penn State.
Creating a site here is very similar to creating a free blog with Wordpress.com—Penn State offers free hosting for students to run the files necessary for the Wordpress CMS. Penn State has to be a little careful with letting people run amok with it's web servers, so there are some limitations to what you can do with with these sites:
- Plugins: One of the most popular features of Wordpress is the massive library of plugins. In order to help thousands of PSU students maintain their sites, there are a limited number of Plugins available to use with PSU Sites.
- Raw Files: You will not have access to the raw files that are used to run Wordpress. This means even if you know PHP, you won't be able to do crazy advanced customization of these sites.
- Domain Names: Since your sites are hosted by Penn State, they will have URL's like "http://sites.psu.edu/YourName"
Further instructions on creating your blog are located in Exercise 2 of this Lesson.
Optional Tutorials
Specific instructions will be provided for upcoming exercises and assignments, but if you want more general guidance on using Wordpress, you can check out the following Lynda videos:
Video Playlist: Wordpress Basics